PHILADELPHIA - Barack Obama’s scheduled at 9 a.m. to address about 1,000 members of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, which is holding a convention here in the City of Brotherly Love. Gotta feeling the soaring rhetoric will lessen a little bit and the hard-nosed message about rewriting NAFTA and creating jobs through alternative energy development will be trumpeted more.
I wonder if he’ll say what he did in Wilkes-Barre yesterday, that manufacturing jobs simply aren’t coming back.
Winning this labor union’s support is vital if Obama’s going to overtake Hillary Clinton before April 22. The AFL-CIO has 830,000 members in this state, and Obama lost the blue collar vote in Ohio.
Obama’s backed by the 75,000-member SEIU and several other unions, and Tuesday a major Philadelphia union representing 10,000 workers here endorsed the Illinois senator. Clinton’s done better with AFL-CIO members, having garnered the backing of a dozen different unions which fall under AFL-CIO’s umbrella.
Clinton addressed this group yesterday, saying Obama’s tired and she’s like Rocky Balboa, willing to fight to the end. I wonder if she realizes Rocky didn’t win in the first movie.
And she dipped into the NAFTA issue. Here’s what the Associated Press reported:
Clinton also told the labor audience that as first lady she had forcefully battled NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, even as her husband was aggressively pushing for its passage through Congress. The agreement is widely unpopular with organized labor because it helped clear the way for many blue-collar jobs to be moved to Mexico and other countries with cheaper labor costs.
“I did speak out and oppose NAFTA,” she said. “I raised a big yellow flag and said ‘I don’t think this will work.’”
How strongly Clinton worked against NAFTA while in the White House remains a matter of some dispute. Former aides to Bill Clinton have said she was skeptical of the agreement, but largely because she felt it conflicted with her effort to pass health care reform.
Speaking to reporters later, Clinton insisted she had voiced objections to the substance of the proposal, not just its timing.
“I was in many meetings starting in the ‘92 campaign — I raised questions,” she said. “I did it in the White House again, in meetings with as many different audiences in the White House in the decision-making process that I could speak to. But the president made a decision. As part of an administration, I believe you support the president, and I did.”
In another development, Obama just picked up the endorsement of Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Commission. Good? Well, not a major endorsement like an Al Gore or John Edwards, but certainly helpful for those voters who consider national security and a failure to make America safer their most important issue.
