The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [56]
“It’s nothing personal, Barack,” he said with a rueful smile. “You know, Tom Hynes and me go back fifty years. Grew up in the same neighborhood. Belonged to the same parish. Hell, I watched Danny grow up.”
I told him I understood.
“Maybe you could run for Danny’s spot once he goes to the Senate. Whaddya think? You’d make a heck of a comptroller.”
I went over to my staff to tell them we would not be getting the AFL-CIO endorsement.
Again things worked out. The leaders of several of the largest service workers unions—the Illinois Federation of Teachers, SEIU, AFSCME, and UNITE HERE, representing textile, hotel, and foodservice workers—broke ranks and chose to endorse me over Hynes, support that proved critical in giving my campaign some semblance of weight. It was a risky move on their part; had I lost, those unions might have paid a price in access, in support, in credibility with their members.
So I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way; I don’t mind feeling obligated toward home health-care workers who clean bedpans every day for little more than the minimum wage, or toward teachers in some of the toughest schools in the country, many of whom have to dip into their own pockets at the beginning of every school year to buy crayons and books for their students. I got into politics to fight for these folks, and I’m glad a union is around to remind me of their struggles.
But I also understand that there will be times when these obligations collide with other obligations—the obligation to inner-city children who are unable to read, say, or the obligation to children not yet born whom we are saddling with debt. Already there have been some strains—I’ve proposed experimenting with merit pay for teachers, for example, and have called for raising fuel-efficiency standards despite opposition from my friends at the United Auto Workers. I like to tell myself that I will continue to weigh the issues on the merits—just as I hope my Republican counterpart will weigh the no-new-tax pledge or opposition to stem cell research that he made before the election in light of what’s best for the country as a whole, regardless of what his supporters demand. I hope that I can always go to my union friends and explain why my position makes sense, how it’s consistent with both my values and their long-term interests.
But I suspect that the union leaders won’t always see it that way. There may be times when they will see it as betrayal. They may alert their members that I have sold them out. I may get angry mail and angry phone calls. They may not endorse me the next time around.
And perhaps, if that happens to you enough times, and you almost lose a race because a critical constituency is mad at you, or you find yourself fending off a primary challenger who’s calling you a traitor, you start to lose your stomach for confrontation. You ask yourself, just what does good conscience dictate exactly: that you avoid capture by “special interests” or that you avoid dumping on your friends? The answer is not obvious. So you start voting as you would answer a questionnaire. You don’t ponder your positions too deeply. You check the yes box up and down the line.
POLITICIANS HELD CAPTIVE by their big-money contributors or succumbing to interest-group pressure—this is a staple of modern political reporting, the story line that weaves its way into just about every analysis of what’s wrong with our democracy. But for the politician who is worried about keeping his seat, there is a third force that pushes and pulls at him, that shapes the nature of political debate and defines the scope of what he feels he can and can’t do, the positions he can and can’t take. Forty or fifty years ago, that force would have been the party apparatus: the big-city bosses, the political fixers, the power brokers in Washington who