The Nation The midterm elections are twenty-seven days away, and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has been keeping a relentless road schedule campaigning for Democratic candidates. One thing he’d like to see more of: talk about basic economic fairness issues.
“I think more populism, or more focus on the economic issues, would be helpful,” he told a small group of reporters at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC. “I think it would help drive turnout as well. I think the candidates that focus only on negative things, doing everything negative, have a real danger of having their base go flat.”
Trumka said that in talking to workers on the campaign trail, he frequently confronts a problem that has bedeviled Democrats in many past midterms: apathy. Union members wonder why it matters if they vote.
2 comments:
There's an interesting dynamic, libertarian and ruthless Ayn Rand indivudualists are willingly regimented into a totalitarian party while those who work for a living would rathet escape one more recruitment indignity. As with celebrating holidays like Memorial Day or Labor Day they exercize their freedom to be individualists, if for a few precious hours while they are off the clock.
I imagine the apathy can be explained by the fact that when working people try to steer the ship of state, they have an experience similar to the toddler in the car-shaped grocery cart: the wheel turns, but the cart always goes where mommy wants it to go.
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