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Fear and Divisiveness Trumps Jobs, Health Care
President Morton Bahr's column in the CWA News post-election edition:
I couldn't be prouder of the legions of CWA members, officers and staff who participated in the largest election mobilization we've ever mounted. If the election had been up to union families, John Kerry would have won the presidency in a 2-to-1 landslide.
It's disappointing to put in so much hard work only to fall narrowly short of our goal - ultimately, by some 130,000 votes in Ohio. But we should feel good about having made an extraordinary stand for working families and future generations.
And we must resolve to regroup and keep fighting, to build upon the organizational ties we forged with many allies, and to keep the spirit and energy of this campaign alive. Because the key issues, the threats to our economy and our nation that we and John Kerry and John Edwards battled to address, are still there. Unresolved.
When the sun came up November 3rd, 45 million Americans still had no health coverage - and no prospects for health care reform.
A worker could still be fired for trying to organize a union, with little expectation that our government would start protecting that basic right.
We still had an administration handing tax breaks to corporations for outsourcing jobs while presiding over a net loss of a million jobs in its first term - one quarter of them in Ohio.
Record budget deficits continued to mount and to starve needed funding for education, worker training, health services for children and other programs in our beleaguered states.
Oil prices continued to soar with no plan by our government to conserve energy and reduce our reliance on foreign reserves.
The team that gave us the bungled mess in Iraq remained in place to "stay the course" in virtual isolation from the rest of the world.
Union members knew what was at stake. Post-election polling showed that unionists voted over issues like jobs and the economy, the health care crisis, and the handling of the Iraq situation.
By contrast, Bush voters in battleground states cited "moral values" as their top priority instead of jobs, health care and education. What drives so many middle-class and working poor citizens to ignore their own economic interests and vote, in effect, for a policy of tax breaks for millionaires?
GOP strategist Karl Rove understands.
The White House conducted an effective campaign of fear and cultural divisiveness, intending to distract voters from its own incompetent record while raising fears of terrorist threats and even attacking John Kerry's heroic war record and claiming he'd be weak in waging the war on terror.
"Values," of course, has become a code term for such cultural wedge issues as abortion and gay rights, and the Bush forces raised the latter by endorsing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which few public officials take seriously, and which Bush himself opposed before this campaign. (A flip-flop?) An anti-gay-marriage measure was on the ballot in Ohio, as in 10 other states, adding to a surge of Bush voters coming to the polls for the first time.
We can't let Bush and Rove continue to define what constitutes America's "values" and morality in a cynical attempt to rule by splitting our nation along cultural fault lines.
We have to continue to proclaim that real family values mean family-supporting jobs with a 40-hour workweek that allows parents to spend quality time with their children. Family values mean good public schools and a chance for our kids to go on to college if that is their dream. Family values mean insuring that our Social Security and Medicare safety nets are there for our elderly family members.
As for morality, I submit that it's immoral for the richest country on earth to allow 45 million of its citizens, a majority of them children, to go without health care coverage - no doubt contributing to the fact that our life expectancy is lower than that of 47 other countries.
With the results of this election, which also strengthened the president's hand in Congress, our job is even harder. That just means we're going to have to work harder. CWA and the rest of the union movement really are the lifeline for our members and other working people in George Bush's America.
I couldn't be prouder of the legions of CWA members, officers and staff who participated in the largest election mobilization we've ever mounted. If the election had been up to union families, John Kerry would have won the presidency in a 2-to-1 landslide.
It's disappointing to put in so much hard work only to fall narrowly short of our goal - ultimately, by some 130,000 votes in Ohio. But we should feel good about having made an extraordinary stand for working families and future generations.
And we must resolve to regroup and keep fighting, to build upon the organizational ties we forged with many allies, and to keep the spirit and energy of this campaign alive. Because the key issues, the threats to our economy and our nation that we and John Kerry and John Edwards battled to address, are still there. Unresolved.
When the sun came up November 3rd, 45 million Americans still had no health coverage - and no prospects for health care reform.
A worker could still be fired for trying to organize a union, with little expectation that our government would start protecting that basic right.
We still had an administration handing tax breaks to corporations for outsourcing jobs while presiding over a net loss of a million jobs in its first term - one quarter of them in Ohio.
Record budget deficits continued to mount and to starve needed funding for education, worker training, health services for children and other programs in our beleaguered states.
Oil prices continued to soar with no plan by our government to conserve energy and reduce our reliance on foreign reserves.
The team that gave us the bungled mess in Iraq remained in place to "stay the course" in virtual isolation from the rest of the world.
Union members knew what was at stake. Post-election polling showed that unionists voted over issues like jobs and the economy, the health care crisis, and the handling of the Iraq situation.
By contrast, Bush voters in battleground states cited "moral values" as their top priority instead of jobs, health care and education. What drives so many middle-class and working poor citizens to ignore their own economic interests and vote, in effect, for a policy of tax breaks for millionaires?
GOP strategist Karl Rove understands.
The White House conducted an effective campaign of fear and cultural divisiveness, intending to distract voters from its own incompetent record while raising fears of terrorist threats and even attacking John Kerry's heroic war record and claiming he'd be weak in waging the war on terror.
"Values," of course, has become a code term for such cultural wedge issues as abortion and gay rights, and the Bush forces raised the latter by endorsing a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, which few public officials take seriously, and which Bush himself opposed before this campaign. (A flip-flop?) An anti-gay-marriage measure was on the ballot in Ohio, as in 10 other states, adding to a surge of Bush voters coming to the polls for the first time.
We can't let Bush and Rove continue to define what constitutes America's "values" and morality in a cynical attempt to rule by splitting our nation along cultural fault lines.
We have to continue to proclaim that real family values mean family-supporting jobs with a 40-hour workweek that allows parents to spend quality time with their children. Family values mean good public schools and a chance for our kids to go on to college if that is their dream. Family values mean insuring that our Social Security and Medicare safety nets are there for our elderly family members.
As for morality, I submit that it's immoral for the richest country on earth to allow 45 million of its citizens, a majority of them children, to go without health care coverage - no doubt contributing to the fact that our life expectancy is lower than that of 47 other countries.
With the results of this election, which also strengthened the president's hand in Congress, our job is even harder. That just means we're going to have to work harder. CWA and the rest of the union movement really are the lifeline for our members and other working people in George Bush's America.