Labor gets chance to take center stage

By Michael Mishak

Saturday, Jan. 20, 2007 | 7:10 a.m.

The Democratic National Committee gave Nevada the No. 2 slot on its 2008 presidential nomination calendar last year for three reasons: its ethnically diverse population, its strong union presence and its chance to raise issues of importance to the West.

Guess which of those three is center stage.

In the words of Tom Collins, state Democratic Party chairman, "Labor is in the house."

Although the state Democratic Party is trying to play down the relationship, Democrats and unions will be joined at the hip for the state's caucuses next Jan. 19.

The bond stems partly from the traditional kinship between the Democrats and organized labor. But the relationship will be especially deep in Nevada because the party, never known for cohesiveness or strong planning, needs the unions' manpower and organizational help.

"The Democrats are making a pretty tall promise," Fred Lokken, a professor of political science at Nevada's Truckee Meadows Community College, said of the challenges involved in turning Nevada's historically sleep y caucus into an event deserving of the state's new position in the primary season calendar. "They're going to need the organization to pull it off."

The party's bond with the unions was on display last Saturday as about 200 Democrats gathered at UNLV. Led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, speakers made no mention of public lands, water rights or even Yucca Mountain, three seminal Nevada issues.

Instead, three national labor leaders told the crowd to hold candidates accountable on jobs, health care, education and economic issues important to working families. Also important, said AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson, would be "restoring the right of good people to join a union."

AFSCME International President Gerald McEntee told the crowd in a fiery, five-minute speech , "You've got to be out to the forums and the caucuses. You've got to make it happen."

The remarks drew a strong response from the crowd. But the message wasn't as important as the one Reid delivered afterward, at a private lunch with local union leaders.

Reid, whose staff has been heavily involved in the caucus process, told the group that the party would rely on organized labor - perhaps more than ever before - to be a central partner, according to sources familiar with the discussion.

In 2008 the party hopes to provide about 1,000 meeting sites statewide for as many as 100,000 Democrats. The goal is ambitious, and with the clock ticking, the party has its work cut out. Nevada had just 17 caucus sites in 2004 - one per county - and drew about 9,000 voters, or less than 3 percent of registered Democrats.

UNLV political science professor David Damore said that while the state party is more organized than at any time in recent memory, it's still young, and doesn't have the sheer manpower and organizational knack to roll out the infrastructure for 1,000 sites, he said.

Enter organized labor, which represents nearly 14 percent of the state's workers and is politically active.

Jean Hessburg, the former executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party recruited by Reid to run Nevada's caucuses, said this week that besides turning out members to the individual caucus sites, the unions would be doing the "lion's share" of the party's organizational work: scouting meeting locations, finding precinct captains, training workers and educating voters - namely union members.

"They want us to participate in a big way - and we will," said Danny Thompson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO. Thompson, whose union has 200,000 members statewide, was one of three representatives who went to New Orleans to urge the DNC to move Nevada to the No. 2 slot.

Yet now that the work is under way, party officials are growing skittish about perceptions that labor and its issues could dominate the caucuses.

Asked about labor's central role in the caucuses, state party spokeswoman Kirsten Searer said: "Make no mistake, this is a party operation. Labor unions are going to participate in the caucus but we are the ones - absolutely - that are setting the rules."

She added: "This is going to be an open, clear and firm process."

Union leaders agree, publicly. "We won't tell our members who to vote for, but we'll train them on how the process works and ensure that they have all the tools to turn out others," Thompson said. "Our role in this process is to facilitate."

Privately, however, union officials are giving those assurances with a wink. In sum, labor has an agenda it wants advanced in Nevada - through the caucuses.

That can be done in obvious ways, through endorsements, as well as subtl y. "Unions are better positioned to exert influence in caucuses than other groups," said Peverill Squire, a political science professor at University of Iowa and an expert on state caucuses.

"It could be a situation where if it appears that the unions better understand how this process works and they're the ones who are going to show up, people could worry their voice won't be heard," Squire said. "It's critical for the integrity of the process that people see the caucus as organized in a way that's fair to all the candidates and all the participants."

Otherwise, some presidential candidates may concede Nevada to others with stronger union credentials, such as John Edwards, who was John Kerry's running mate in 2004.

Another possibility is that the nation would discount the Nevada result as heavily skewed toward labor and thus not the broad indicator of a candidate's strength in the West that the state Democrats hope the caucuses will provide.

Edwards enjoys a close relationship with John Wilhelm, president of UNITE Here, parent union of the Culinary Union, which, with 60,000 members, is the state's largest and most politically active local.

In Iowa, where the first-in-nation caucuses will be held five days before Nevada's, unions have not played a significant role in the mechanics, said Arthur Sanders, a political science professor at Drake University in Iowa. "The party has been organizing caucuses for a long time," he said. "They have a cadre of their own people to help out."

In Nevada, he said, the party-labor bond is a necessary marriage.