Enough with dumping on Hillary's polling expert

Count me as a skeptic on the current ideological purity campaign among progressive bloggers relative to the polling expert for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Mark Penn.

Penn is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, the huge PR firm that probably has had every multinational corporation in the world as a client at one time or another. One strain of progressive thought is that, inherently, that makes Penn someone who cannot be trusted. Corporations, after all, are against the little guys – never mind the complexity surrounding how many billions they pay in wages to them – while we are for the little guy. A second line focuses, more legitimately in my view, on the fact that, as a firm representing corporations, B-M has a “labor relations” practice as well. In the real world, although they would never admit to it in those terms, that means they bust unions. B-M no doubt takes a role as a “good corporate citizen” very seriously, and would certainly defend this operation as merely allowing managements to utilize their First Amendment rights and make sure unions toe the line legally, and, if they win, win fair and square. They may even have done some PR work for unions -- the come-one, come-all approach to representation, so long as there is not a direct conlict-of-interest -- although I doubt they would do that in their union elections practice.

Nevertheless, “labor relations” today inherently means “union busting,” because under Bush, with a National Labor Relations Board majority that fundamentally despises labor law, the envelope for accepted “best practices” in defeating union representation campaigns has been pushed far beyond any recognition from the last century. Even though a B-M (and the law firms that help them) will claim to be staying rigorously within the law as it has been interpreted and enforced, I doubt that, in an unguarded moment of honesty, most of the practitioners of this genuinely black art would not admit some of the things they do are things they not long ago considered direct violations of the wording and intent of the National Labor Relations Act. Just think of WalMart. How in the world can a company of that enormous size and reach possibly be successful in stopping labor representation everywhere, every time, and be fully operating within a law intended to protect the right of workers to form a union? It is not possible, except when the law has been so gutted that it barely functions the way it was intended. (It may not even be possible then -- TBD in some lawsuits.)

It certainly is a PR issue for a Democratic Party candidate to be affiliated with a union-buster. The right of workers to organize and bargain for better working conditions, as a counter-balance to the state-created power of the modern corporation, is in my opinion the fundamental principle of the Democratic Party. All the other efforts to use government power to improve the workplace, and the lot of ordinary Americans, springs from this principle: people need to have the right to join together to fend for themselves against the organized power of the business enterprise, the only possible referee is the government. For the most part, it has been an extraordinarily successful system – successful for the workers (including non-unionized workers far up into the white collar ranks who, in effect, free-ride off of union gains), and, in other than the most simple-minded way of viewing the world, successful for the companies that live with it without rancor.

But some people in management are like TV pundits: they have outsized egos, and they never like anyone telling them what they have to do. They have their court jesters, too, the economists and analysts who think management needs to be able to act on their “visions” without the messy interruptions that unions might cause. The jesters aid and abet that desire for executive omnipotence from everything except the marketplace itself -- and not even that if there is a bang-up K Street operation that can use government to gain some monopoly-like marketplace advantages. (Remember the once-progressive Jeff Greenfield bowing unctuously in front of adoring MBA-candidate audiences to new age CEOs as if they were rock stars?) If the corporation uses all of its sources of power to keep costs down at the expense of the employees, its economic power as well as the power of the state and the legal system, hey, terrific, look at that stock price go! And look at the CEO's options go!

Having said all that, it is dangerously short-sighted to think being strongly pro-union means being reflexively anti-corporation. Or even necessarily, reflexively anti-management. You think GM workers can’t distinguish between GM as the enormous enterprise that makes cars, GM managers who respect the role of the union, and managers who try to bust the union – or, like the United Air Lines idiots, managers who take care of themselves while asking ordinary workers to carry all the burdens? Big corporations are not going away. Employees have complex love-hate relationships with their employers, often carrying pride in their company while fighting management for their proper share of the pie. The majority of American workers will continue to work for and be paid by them. If the progressive Democrats are unable to make these distinctions, they run the risk of being irrelevant, even to their natural constituencies. After all, when the workers get share they can consider proper, the pie grows and everyone comes out ahead, including the companies themselves. When management refuses to live with a process designed to make sure the share is proper, and focuses strictly on their own short-term gain and that of the shareholders, the pie tend to shrink over the long haul. After all, no matter how much the 26-year-old Wall Street analysts may cheer the "tough medicine," cutting jobs, refusing to pay fair wages and cutting back on benefits, usually with anticipated reductions in service to the customer, is the first stage of a liquidation.

To me, this is the legitimate part of the “Third Way” or the DLC: fairness to workers and ordinary Americans, including tough love stuff like strict environmental and product and workplace safety laws – yes, even products liability class action lawsuits out of the dreaded tort system -- benefits everyone, even the wealthy, and even the companies that are given a level playing field. It does not mean necessarily attacking the corporations. (The part of the DLC way of thinking that is wrong is the one that thinks splitting the difference between radical right-wing and the moderately liberal policies we believe in, like going to half private accounts for Social Security to reach a compromise with the right wing or suppoorting the President in Iraq to show Democrats can be tough on terror, too, is the way to electoral success. It’s the way to weakness. The minority of voters who can’t see it for themselves will have their eyes opened by the opposition.) During the Clinton administration, incomes of the lower half of society increased more than they had for 30 years. But guess what: although for the first time in a long time the poorer half were getting a bigger piece of the pie, the incomes of the wealthy were also growing faster than they had in the previous (and later) Republican administrations – because the pie for everyone was growing more. The moral: keep your eye on the prize. The goal is helping ordinary people claim a bigger piece of the action, the poor and the middle class, not hurting the corporation or the wealthy.

So where does Mark Penn and his company come into this? I assume Mr. Penn thinks he is a good Democrat, or he would not work for Hillary Clinton. I’ll bet he even believes in unions, even if I think he is being naïve to think what they are doing is not truly union-busting. As critical as I think the labor laws are, if he is definitely on our side on 37 issues, and not on this one, I am not going to try to drum him out of the party, or tell any candidate not to use his expertise. One of the biggest reasons the Republicans have gained the upper hand is that they have exploited the enormous marketing expertise of the corporations to build their massive message machine. The recent fate of the Democratic Party and the weakness of its message machine shows the dire need for the kind of work Penn does – using statistical analysis of demographics and multiple opinions on many issues to identify common groupings of voters and their thought patterns that may not otherwise be obvious. It is a lot closer in sophistication to what the Republicans have at their disposal than anything the Democrats apparently have had before now. Anyone who thinks the Democrats don’t need that – not to establish their principles, but to figure out how to reach the most people and persuade them -- is simply naïve.

If I were Hillary, I would deal with it as an intra-party PR problem exactly as suggested above: “Mark considers himself a good Democrat, and he is on our side on almost every issue. I strongly disagree with that work by his company. He doesn’t think it’s union-busting, but I do considering what’s now being allowed by the Bush administration that wouldn't have been allowed 10 years ago. When I get elected, I intend to restore and strengthen the right of workers to organize and bargain. It’s an essential part of a successful economy and society. Nevertheless, despite that disagreement, Mark’s expertise is extraordinarily valuable, and I am going to continue to use it.”