No sense of excitement for candidate John Kerry

I spent Sunday afternoon getting reacquainted with politics at its basic level: going door to door asking for votes. Members of several South Florida unions were doing the asking; I tagged along to hear their pitch and listen to the reaction.

''Not interested,'' said the man who answered the door at the Smith household in Plantation, heard the pitch and then slammed the door shut. But he was the only one who wasn't interested or willing to talk about issues and presidential candidates at the dozen or so homes we visited over the course of two hours. Everyone else listened politely and answered questions thoughtfully.

''No problem,'' said Don Cote. ''You got questions, fire away.'' Team leader Jonathan Scott did, working from a crib sheet prepared by the AFL-CIO. ''Are you worried about American jobs going overseas?'' Jonathan asked. ''You bet,'' said Cote, a maintenance worker for the Broward public schools. ``Keep the jobs here. I want nothing going overseas.''

He also responded positively to the other two hot-button issues on the union crib sheet -- the high cost of healthcare and the financial integrity of Social Security. ''I'm 52, I sure hope it's there when I retire,'' Cote said, ''but I wonder if it will be.'' And which presidential candidate does he prefer? ''I'm for Kerry,'' Cote replied quickly. ``I don't want Bush in there.''

Significantly, he was the only person visited who picked Kerry without hesitation. More typical was Barbara Lockwood, a high school teacher, who said that she and her husband are ''leaning'' toward Kerry. Her neighbor Rita Haydu, also a teacher, explained that she's ``undecided because I'm not impressed with either one of them (Bush and Kerry). It'll come down to who Kerry picks for vice president. I hope it's (John) Edwards.''

It's scant evidence, but my afternoon in a mostly white, middle-class suburb of the most Democratic county in Florida tells me that John Kerry still has a lot of work to do to win the hearts, minds and votes of what should be his natural constituency. All the families we visited have at least one member who belongs to a union; if they're not almost automatically in the Kerry column, who is?

''As a rule, we in the AFL-CIO don't do precinct walks,'' organizer Patricia Connor told about 75 union members before the Sunday walk began, ''but we're sure doing it this year because of what's at stake. Because we want to bring democracy back to America.'' That is, organized labor wants to bring a Democrat back to the White House.

But not one member of the canvassing team I was assigned to spoke with any special enthusiasm for the Democrat who will lead the ticket, Kerry. ''I'm not a political activist,'' high school math teacher Angel Gómez, 35, told me. ''I think of myself as a public servant. I'm doing this because I want to see that education is funded properly.'' He says that Kerry is a ''better option'' than Bush, hardly a ringing endorsement.

Jonathan Scott, 48, our team leader, was even less supportive of Kerry. ''I'm not really into politics,'' says Jonathan, who belongs to Local 500 of IATSE. ''But I love this country and want to see government run properly.'' He avers that Kerry could ''probably'' do it better than Bush.

The union professionals who organized the weekend of precinct walking are, predictably, ardent Kerry supporters. Or perhaps it would more accurate to call them ardent Bush opponents. The coordinator of the weekend canvass was 26-year-old Miguel Carillo of San Jose, Calif., a full-time AFL-CIO employee who'll spend the next four months in Florida trying to pull off a Kerry victory.

Surveying the room of 75 Broward union members, he told me: ``What you have here are people who really care about the November election because they know how much is at stake if George Bush is reelected. It's that face-to-face contact that gets the message across.''

The contact and civic spirit were impressive. But I still didn't sense any excitement or passion for Kerry from these union members. They were willing to go door-to-door in blistering heat on their day off for their personal issues and union loyalty, but they didn't seem to connect it directly with Kerry.

Every presidential successful candidate has a hard-core cadre of supporters who see his candidacy as a crusade. The folks I saw on Sunday weren't Kerry crusaders. He won't win without an army of them.

Union influence
townhall.com ^ | 6/16/04 | Linda Chavez

Bill Clinton's memoir will hit bookstores later this month, but one story you're not likely to read in its pages involves Clinton's friendship with Arthur A. Coia. The debonair former president of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) was one of the Democratic Party's biggest contributors when Clinton was in office.

In the first four years of the Clinton administration alone, LIUNA gave $4.8 million to Democrat candidates and the Democratic Party. Although Clinton had contact with Coia no fewer than 120 times, their association is an awkward memory for the former president given the latter's ties to organized crime and that of the union he once headed.

In 1986, President Reagan's Commission on Organized Crime identified LIUNA as one of the "bad four" -- the most corrupt unions in the nation -- along with the Teamsters, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Workers, and the International Association of Longshoremen.

According to Congressional testimony by the FBI, each of these union's presidents at the time had been "handpicked by La Cosa Nostra."

Angelo Fosco, who served as LIUNA president from 1975-1993, won reelection while he was under federal indictment for union racketeering -- a victory won through "the use of force and threats of violence against potential competitors," according to the Reagan Crime Commission.

And Coia was no exception. He became secretary treasurer of LIUNA in 1987, the No. 2 job in the union, with the blessings of the Chicago mob, according to Coia's own admissions in sworn testimony.

When Clinton tried to reward Coia for his political contributions by appointing him to a prestigious presidential commission, the Council on Competitiveness, the appointment set off alarm bells at the FBI.

In a memo, investigators doing a background check wrote, "Coia is a criminal associate of the New England Patriarca organized crime family."

The bureau also warned the White House that "within the next several weeks" the Department of Justice "will accuse Coia of being a puppet of the LCN (La Cosa Nostra)."

Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis even tried calling the White House to warn officials not to get too close to the alleged mob-controlled union boss -- to no avail.

Although Clinton dropped plans to name Coia to the Council on Competitiveness, he continued to meet with the union leader, exchanged expensive gifts and frequent notes with him, and invited him to travel aboard the presidential aircraft on a trip to Rhode Island.

All of this went on while the Justice Department was preparing a racketeering complaint against Coia and his union.

On Nov. 4, 1994, the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section served Coia with a 212-page draft complaint.

"Then something strange happened," noted the liberal muckraking magazine Washington Monthly at the time. Instead of indicting Coia, the Justice Department worked out a sweetheart deal that allowed Coia to avoid prosecution and keep his job, while a federally appointed investigator pursued lower-level mobsters within the union.

Just days before the Justice Department offered the deal, Hillary Clinton traveled to Miami to address the annual LIUNA conference on Feb. 6, 1995, despite warnings from the Justice Department that the trip was ill advised.

The decision not to move forward with its complaint shocked everyone, except perhaps Coia himself.

The Justice Department had previously filed racketeering charges in 15 other union cases, taking over the corrupt unions' operations.

But Clinton couldn't protect his union benefactor forever -- especially when Coia himself couldn't keep his hands out of the union cookie jar.

In January 2000, Arthur Coia pled guilty for failing to pay taxes on the purchase of three Ferraris from a Rhode Island car dealer who held a million-dollar leasing agreement with the union. As part of his plea agreement, Coia stepped down as LIUNA president but was allowed to keep his $250,000 yearly salary for life.

If the Clinton administration's dealings with Arthur Coia and the Laborers Union were an isolated incident, it would be bad enough, but the corrupting nexus between union money and Democratic political power was especially tight during the Clinton years. But the unions' role in financing Democrats didn't end when Bill Clinton left office.

This election cycle, unions will spend an estimated $800 million, much of it hidden in the form of salaries for union officials assigned to work on political campaigns, member communications, get-out-the-vote efforts, and other unregulated contributions that go overwhelmingly to elect Democrats.

But don't expect to read about it on the front page of the New York Times or in Clinton's memoir.

Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Townhall.com member organization.

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