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Back in December, the Wall Street Journal reported that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling congressional Democrats that passing the insurance-industry-written Senate health bill will do for Democrats what NAFTA did for them in 1994. Amazingly, Emanuel has been billing this as a positive - as if NAFTA somehow wasn't a major part of what drove down Democratic base turnout in the 1994 election, helping usher in the Gingrich Revolution.
But while Emanuel is obviously wrong in his understanding of exactly what effect NAFTA had on Democrats, a new poll from Massachusetts shows he is exactly right that a corporate-written health care bill could have exactly the same effect as NAFTA come election time:
Union Households Gave Boost to GOP's Brown
WASHINGTON-Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate race was lifted by strong support from union households, in a sign of trouble for President Barack Obama and Democrats who are counting on union support in the 2010 midterm elections.
A poll conducted on behalf of the AFL-CIO found that 49% of Massachusetts union households supported Mr. Brown in Tuesday's voting, while 46% supported Democrat Martha Coakley. The poll conducted by Hart Research Associates surveyed 810 voters.
Karen Ackerman, the AFL-CIO's political action director, said the results of the Massachusetts poll indicate "what we call a working-class revolt" in which voters were responding to the fact that no one was addressing their needs or interests...
Guy Molyneux, a pollster with Hart Research Associates, said the poll showed "pretty strong evidence" of voters who worried the health-care overhaul moving through Congress would tax their employer-provided benefits...
In light of other polls showing Massachusetts voters are angry about the corporate-giveaway nature of the specific health care bill before Congress - not the prospect of health care reform in general - the new finding about union households are not surprising. When Democrats run "over the dead bodies" of labor, as they did with NAFTA and as they are trying to do with the Senate health care bill, nobody should expect union households to do anything other than vote against Democrats.
Put another way, while Emanuel and his cohorts in the D.C. political chattering class tend to see politics as a competition between monolithic blocs of voters who automatically and fully align with one party (ie. unionists vote for Democrats, evangelicals vote for Republicans, etc.), that's just not how it works out here in the real non-political-junkie world. It doesn't take a political genius or a proctologist to know that when a party tries to take a steaming shit on, say, unions, it's a good bet that union workers are going to retaliate by taking a shit on that same party come the next election.
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