interviews
Labor and the White House
by Dave Weigel
March 31, 2021
This interview with Dave Weigel, national reporter covering politics for the Washington Post, was conducted and condensed by franknews and Payday Report.
DW | The White House's involvement in the Amazon union drive was a big surprise. I mean, we know where it could have originated, the union talked to the White House; they have kind of an open door with Biden that they didn't have with Trump. We know that Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ campaign chairman, and his group, Perfect Union, got involved. So, there was public pressure.
The fact that the White House and the president released that video was a big deal to people. And, he made this decision to get involved very early on in his presidency. It was within his first 50 days. He decided to do what hadn't been done before and give a message in support of the union. It was a very careful message. The new labor secretary, Marty Walsh, when asked specifically about Amazon, responded in more general tones.
But, no matter what happens, if you are in for a penny, you are in for a pound.
A lot of previous presidents, including Barack Obama, said a lot less about these union drives and, in doing so, limited their own exposure. If the drive didn't work, people didn't say that the president supported something that didn't work. The fact that Biden made a statement, early on, when it wasn't clear how this was going to go, is a real political statement of what they thought was important.
frank | How do you think his background plays a role in this?
He's always leaned in really hard and identified with workers in the same way he's tried to identify with different civil rights movements. Joe Biden has always wanted to be seen as the kind of person who is coming from Scranton, who has lived through the sixties, and who wants to jump to the front of the march if there is a struggle happening.
He frames everything in terms of fairness. He's not as natural as other members of the party in talking about this. When Bernie Sanders talks about this, for example, he talks about greed, he names CEOs, he says nobody deserves that much money, he talks about a maximum wage and how there should be no billionaires at all. Biden doesn't go that far. Biden has never gone after Jeff Bezos. He's never gone after individual heads of companies the way that Sanders does. He does this sort of a "Hey man, these guys are under assault, somebody needs to stick up for them."
That is something that he has always wanted to be part of his brand. Even when he was voting for trade deals like NAFTA as a Senator, he was never really comfortable. He had the same ideological mindset as a lot of the Democrats in the eighties and the nineties. He did it because he saw that that was the way things were moving and he voted strategically. But, the stuff that fired him up was when he could side with workers. It is the same thing with the projects he took on under Obama when he was Vice President.
During the Democratic primary, he didn't get the same amount of labor support that Hillary Clinton did, but, Sanders didn't get it either. There wasn't the same sort of a landslide of labor to get in early and say, this is our candidate. Instead, they were demanding more of the candidates.
I would cover presidential primary events with the Teamsters in Cedar Rapids or the Building Trades in DC and you would kind of look to the level of applause as an indicator. The interesting thing is that at those events Sanders would lay out the things he did and what he wanted to pass. Biden would go on at length about non-compete clauses and about wage theft and things like that. It was less, "I have studied all of the papers on this and I've decided this is my policy," and more of "this seems unfair and I'm against this thing."
I think the Democratic Party is increasingly understanding what labor can mean for them strategically.
Republicans have gotten kind of tangled up on labor. They have done better with union households, but they are basically the party of deregulation still. They've never really moved on the labor part of their messaging. That makes it easier for Biden to compete for these workers. When it comes down to it, Republicans want “right-to-work." Josh Hawley, who branded himself as a working-class candidate, for example, supports a national right-to-work.
Biden was very concerned with winning back more union households. Union workers were saying, “Democrats had the presidency for 16 years. What do they do for us?” Biden didn't have all the answers that labor wanted, but he was making a lot of specific promises about how he was going to act. He talked about infrastructure spending and about how he was going to run the NLRB and how he was going to approach employers. It was less than Sanders did, but that's way more than Democrats had done in the past.
I mean, the McCain/Romney era Republicans had no appeal to the sort of voters who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump. Biden only peeled back maybe 10% of them depending on where you're talking about, but it has made life easier for Democrats.
This fight has in large part been framed in the context of continuing a battle for civil rights. Do you see Biden lean into that messaging?
Biden did not really lean to the racial justice aspect or the civil rights legacy aspect of this labor fight. When the congressional delegation here came down a couple of weeks before the vote, they were much more explicit. Someone like Jamal Bowman or Cori Bush is much more comfortable saying that than Biden. That is the thing about Biden. He basically sets boundaries. He says what his position is and backs off and lets the action happen without his constant commentary. It's very different than Trump in that way too. And that's different than the Sanders position. And it's different than what Warren said her position would be as president.
Can you give us context on how or why you started covering this story?
I started covering the Amazon drive because of the president and members of Congress intervening. I mean, labor decided to get involved months before, but the fact that Democrats were getting involved was new. It has been interesting to monitor their investment in this over other Democratic Party causes.
There's a little bit of intervention from the Democrats, but not, I'd say equal to what Amazon is doing. They are not the advertisements on TV. We all know the Democratic party is kind of involved, but it is not the same political project that I've seen in other places.
There are two stories that kind of were happening at the same time; they have merged, but not completely. One is this labor drive, which is smaller than most drives that have succeeded. It is not overwhelming. You don't see labor signs everywhere you go. But, on the other hand, the level of national involvement is kind of new.
Had Biden said nothing, there would have been a story, but it wouldn't involve the White House, it wouldn't involve the Democratic Party, and it might not involve the PRO Act.
And I think that's going to change because of this.
New interview w/ @daveweigel @PaydayReport
— frank news (@FrankNewsUS) April 6, 2021
"The White House's involvement with the Amazon drive was a big surprise ... Previous presidents, Obama comes to mind, said a lot less. The fact that Biden did that early on is a political statement of what they thought was important." pic.twitter.com/MwYlmqE4xQ
That was a big decision Biden made to be a part of this.
Right. And that political story is interesting. The story here is much more independent. A lot of the people who've come in to help canvas are from smaller groups. You have Black Lives Matter and DSA groups from the area, but you don't have the Democratic Party getting involved in a huge way. I think that is something that people will revisit after the vote.
Should the Democratic Party, like most left parties in the world, be very involved with labor? Should they always take the side of labor?
Most social democratic parties are labor parties and they build up from there. Their coalition includes labor unions. In the British Labour Party, for example, labor has a role in electing the leadership. That is not the case here. That's the conversation I think they're going to start having when this votes over. For example, if there are, and the union says there are, hundreds of people around the country calling them saying, "Hey, I have some questions about what I can do at my fulfillment center in my town," that will be a question for Democrats.
And if Amazon wins, do you get spooked? Amazon has been very punchy in their PR. They might say that a bunch of elite Democrats stood with the union and the workers stood with Amazon. That is very comfortable turf for Amazon to be on, and that leaves a big question open for Democrats. If the union succeeds, throw all of that out the window. I think the lesson that everyone would take in that case would be that if it takes less than a three-minute video from the president to get momentum for something like this, then we should keep doing that. As we talk, I don't know the answer to that question. I think that is something that is going to be answered when the votes are in.
interviews
The Question of Trust in American Politics
by Nick Penniman
December 11, 2020
This interview with Nick Penniman, founder of Issue One, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Nick | I started Issue One six years ago with the explicit purpose of developing a bipartisan organization to pursue political reform at the federal level. Since then, we’ve developed a staff of about 30 and have supported more than a dozen pieces of legislation. Last year, we had three legislative victories. We have recruited 200 former members of Congress to join us as something called The ReFormers Caucus. Nearly half of them are Republicans. Most recently we've pivoted heavily into election integrity issues. We launched a $20 million campaign in October called Count Every Vote to help make sure that the 2020 elections were safe, secure, and complete.
frank | How do you ensure that? What do your specific efforts look like?
Our campaign is mainly a public relations campaign. The purpose of which is to validate the democratic process in this country. The campaign is overseen by the National Council on Election Integrity, which is a group of more than 40 individuals, half Republicans, and half Democrats. It's everyone from Madeleine Albright to Leon Panetta to Tom Ridge to Bill Frist to Tom Daschle to Dan Coats, who was President Donald Trump's director of national intelligence. It's a mix of Democrats and Republicans. There are seven former Cabinet secretaries, nine former U.S. senators, two retired admirals, and one retired general. It’s a great group.
Going into this cycle, we knew Trump was going to try to do exactly what he's doing, which is to proclaim that if he lost, it was because of fraud because of a rigged process. We predicted that that would happen. So we wanted to put up some kind of a counterforce to that that had bipartisan credibility and integrity.
Since the election, we've pivoted into some of these state-by-state fights. We are doing ad campaigns. In sum, it’s a public relations campaign to spread the reassurance message that the democratic process was safe, secure, and definitive, but also, when things go south, to stop things from happening.
Legislatively, it doesn't seem like there's a huge argument on the Trump side, but there’s a lot at stake in terms of people's faith in the electoral system.
Right. Step one was to put forth the propaganda of fraud, and repeat that, and convince enough people within the Republican Party, and enough Trump voters, that this was a fraudulent election. The Politico poll that came out the other week showed that 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not free and fair. Step two is to file the lawsuits to help put forth the notion of fraud. But they've won just one out of over 40 of the lawsuits! They have failed to produce any evidence. They are, in effect, doubling down on the propaganda. Step three is to try to convince states that because the election was fraudulent, it's really up to the legislatures to do the right thing and send Republican slates of electors in order to express the will of the people.
Has anything ever come close to that 70% threshold?
No.
How do you measure your success with your ad campaigns?
It's very hard to measure success. In order to show that the ad campaign is moving the needle in some way, we would have had to have begun a daily or weekly tracking poll a long time ago. But we haven't. Our assumption is that spending a lot of money in these states and putting it on Fox, on conservative talk radio, in bipartisan op-eds in the Milwaukee paper, and things like that, will somehow open up enough room for enough of the Republicans that Trump has been courting to think twice about what they're doing.
What seems to have been revealed through this election is how much hinges on a handful of individuals adhering to democratic norms. Have those norms been broken irreparably
If you go all the way back through 19th and 20th-century presidents, I don't think we've ever had this close brush with true authoritarianism before. You have a president who is willing to destroy all the guardrails, all the democratic norms, and standards to maintain his grip on power, with not enough of a substantial pushback within his own party. It's pretty terrifying. I'm deeply concerned about the future of what the next election cycle looks like.
Trump has done a great job at demeaning and degrading the integrity of our election process in America. It is not unlikely that in future elections, people will continue to feel that it is all rigged. The consequences of that are potentially profound.
That is contrasted, of course, with the recent press release from the Cyber Security Infrastructure Agency that said that they believe that this is the most secure election in U.S. history. At the very moment that we should be celebrating that we voted in the highest percentages in a hundred years, with the highest numbers ever, during a pandemic, with the least amount of interference, we're sitting here scared to death that the president of the United States is going to undermine the popular will of the people. It's a pretty striking moment to be in.
The public trust in our election system and the actual efficiency & reliance of the system are not converging. Our actual progress in terms of election administration is not driving the public perception. What, instead, do you think is driving these narratives?
I think it's been a long time coming. The destruction and depletion of the political system in this country through gerrymandering, through the domination of money in politics, through the barriers that have been put up to people voting, through tribalization of media and information — all of those combined create an environment that's really fertile for authoritarians to claim that the system's rigged against the regular people in this country. That is what Trump did. He claimed that he was going to do something about it, that he was an outsider, and that he was the only one who could do something about it. It was a very appealing pitch in 2016.
For the first time in U.S. history, the majority of people in this country said their children's lives would not be better than their lives. I have three kids. If I actually woke up every single day of my life and looked at my little kids and thought that their lives would be worse than my life and thought that my life is worse than my parents' life – that’s a horrible feeling. Combined, it creates a huge opportunity for someone with an authoritarian mindset to come in and say we need to wreck the whole thing because it's obviously not working for anyone.
If I really had to pin what's occurred in the last month on one phenomenon, it would be on the tribalization of the media. The disparity between the 70% of Republicans who believe that this was not a free and fair election, while our own Department of Homeland Security is claiming that it was the safest and most secure in history shows that we have people living in totally different information environments.
Why do you think that is?
It's a really hard one to solve. We need to reconsolidate the national narrative around journalism. To do that, I think we have to create a campaign equivalent to what we did with smoking. We have to teach people that consuming totally biased, totally propagandistic media is actually bad for them.
I spent 15 years of my life as a journalist before this. I was a newspaper editor and a magazine reporter and then a magazine publisher. My dad was a newspaper publisher. When I grew up, the conversation was centered around a handful of media outlets. I grew up in St. Louis. There was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. There was the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. At our house, we got Newsweek and Time. We would watch the nightly news. And maybe we would get the National Review, a conservative magazine, sent to our house, but that was about it.
What was powerful about that is that all of those places were committed to the project of journalism and to getting it right. The conversation that we were having in this country was not about whether or not the facts existed, but what to do with the facts. That's what we've got to get back to.
The only solution that I can think of is treating it like tobacco. You can do those things if you want, but you should know what they're really bad for you. Ultimately, if you're going to be consuming media a couple of hours a day, you should be going to places that are committed to the art of journalism and to the truth.