An AFSCME ad being broadcast on Florida TV stations that attacks GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Without a Democratic presidential primary contest, unions this year are taking early potshots at Republican primary candidates — especially Mitt Romney — and other GOP leaders through radio and TV ads, as well as other means.
The aim seems less to influence Republican primary voters than to define Romney, who until this week following Newt Gingrich’s South Carolina primary victory was the front-runner in the race, and to gain leverage on other labor issues by tying them to high-profile Republicans vulnerable to bad publicity.
AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, leads the way with $800,000 worth of ads during the current Florida contest. The spot asks, “What kind of businessman is Mitt Romney?,” then tells how Romney made huge profits from the sale of Damon Corporation during his tenure at Bain, his private equity company (watch ad above). Romney served as director of the medical testing firm, which was heavily fined for defrauding Medicare, described by the federal prosecutor as an instance of “corporate greed run amok.”
The ad ends by morphing Romney into Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who ran a hospital chain, Columbia HCA, convicted of massive Medicare fraud, and is now quite unpopular (even though he won his office despite his defrauding a popular government program).
SEIU (Service Employees) also is running Spanish-language radio ads aimed at Romney in Tampa and Orlando, Florida (jointly financed with a pro-Obama Super-PAC, Priorities USA Action). “The two faces of Mitt” ad portrays Romney as appealing to Latinos for support in Spanish ads but in speeches and ads in English, Romney opposes the Dream Act, which would allow undocumented immigrant children who finish college or serve in the military to become citizens, and supports the anti-immigrant legislation passed in Alabama and Arizona.
While Cubans, who can become citizens simply by landing on U.S. soil, are not greatly moved by immigration issues, a growing fraction of Latinos in Florida are from Mexico and other Latin American countries and are very concerned about immigration reform. And their votes could help swing a state like Florida in the fall.
Today and before Thursday’s debate, protesters from the Transport Workers Union will greet Mitt Romney and object to the hiring of Bain & Company — from which Romney still draws much of his $20 million a year income — for the sole purpose of eliminating workers’ jobs at American Eagle, a subsidiary of American Airlines’ holding company. American declared bankruptcy last Nov. 29, and Bain is one of many advisors the company wants to use.
TWU filed objections in court last week to retention of Bain as a waste of huge amounts of money in pursuit of a questionable strategy. Calling Romney a “job cremator” rather than a job creator, TWU president Jim Little said, “It’s outrageous that someone running for president as a ‘job creator’ is going to enrich himself by cutting pensions, cutting wages and destroying American jobs. Like so many on Wall Street, Mitt Romney earns his money by destroying the jobs of airline employees. We’re going to do our best to make sure voters in Florida and elsewhere know exactly where Mitt gets his money.” So far the union has no plans to run ads, however.
The Indiana AFL-CIO, far from the early Republican primaries but in the thick of a fight with Gov. Mitch Daniels and Republican legislators over a “right-to-work” law that reflects the party’s anti-labor politics for 2012, took advantage of Daniels’ role as the Republican respondent to Obama’s state of the union speech last night. It ran ads on cable news and throughout the state showing Daniels promising just a few years ago that he opposed a right-to-work law for Indiana. Today (Wednesday) the Indiana House passed the right-to-work legislation; Gov. Daniels will soon sign it, making Indiana the first state in 10 years to become a right-to-work state.
TV ad campaigns are costly, and unions can hardly hope to spend a tiny fraction of what antagonistic, primarily Republican, candidates will devote to TV, let alone what the right-wing Super-PACS can spend.
But strategically placed, well-done, and politically incisive ads can make a big difference, even with a relatively small buy. And early efforts to define opponents can stick. (By contrast, it’s hard to see that the fuzzy, if important, message in a trial run of national AFL-CIO ads stating that work brings people together will help labor unions much.) But as always, the real power of labor politically comes from mobilizing members and allies to educate and organize workers face-to-face.
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David Moberg, a former senior editor of In These Times, was on staff with the magazine from when it began publishing in 1976 until his passing in July 2022. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.
