 POLITICS
Hatin’ that Store
What Democrats think Wal-Mart can do for them
BYRON YORK
‘If that’s not a winning message, then I don’t know politics.” Chris Kofinis is talking by cell phone from Salem, Oregon, where his organization, Wake Up Wal-Mart, is conducting a rally against the nation’s largest retailer. Kofinis, a former political science teacher at Cal State who left academics to join Wesley Clark’s run for the White House, believes campaigning against Wal-Mart over its allegedly unfair labor practices will be a big winner for Democrats this November, and an even bigger winner in the 2008 presidential race. “The debate about Wal-Mart is a national debate about corporate responsibility, about health care, about the role of China,”
Kofinis says. “This is the beginning of a debate that is going to hit a high point in ‘07 and ‘08.”
Not long ago, the idea that attacking Wal-Mart was smart politics was a somewhat quixotic notion, found mostly in union offices and a few left-wing websites. Today, it’s mainstream Democratic party doctrine. On August 17, the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined “Eye on Election, Democrats Run as Wal-Mart Foe.” Democratic candidates across the country, the paper reported, “have found a new rallying cry that many of them say could prove powerful in the midterm elections and into 2008: denouncing Wal-Mart for what they say are substandard wages and health care benefits.”
Among the Democrats who have joined the anti-Wal-Mart crusade are Sen.Joseph Biden, Sen. Evan Bayh, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former senator John Edwards — that’s a bunch of presidential hopefuls right there — along with members of Congress like Rosa DeLauro, John Conyers, Sherrod Brown, Nancy Kaptur, and others. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was on Wal-Mart’s board of directors back in her Arkansas days, last year returned a $5,000 contribution from the company. Opposition to Wal-Mart even brought the bitter antagonists Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Ned Lamont to the same rally in Connecticut.
In all, Wake Up Wal-Mart staged 35 rallies in 19 states in the weeks leading up to Labor Day. The group’s staffers, like Kofinis, traveled around the country in a 45-foot bus emblazoned with the slogan 2006 CHANGE WAL-MART, CHANGE AMERICA TOUR and JOIN AMERICA’S FIGHT FOR HEALTH CARE. The bus spent a lot of time in Iowa — the tour stopped in Cedar Rapids, Des Moines (twice), Davenport, Waterloo, Iowa City, and Council Bluffs — where Democratic presidential candidates are hanging out these days.
The substance of the anti-Wal-Mart charges heard at the rallies and elsewhere has been hashed out many times. (See “Panic in a Small Town,” NR, December 5, 2005.) Attacked by the left for years, Wal-Mart has pretty effectively rebutted accusations that it destroys communities, pays substandard wages, forces states to pay for the health care of its workers, and in general behaves worse than other big-box retailers. What has changed recently is that some Democrats believe the public is eager to hear the message.
“You see real anger among Republicans, Democrats, independents,” says Kofinis, describing the Wake Up Wal-Mart rallies. “They see themselves being sacrificed to serve the interests of a very small group of individuals.”
Perhaps some do, but how many? Last December, the non-partisan Pew Research Center polled 1,502 Americans — a substantial survey size — and found that most people just don’t feel that way. In fact, they seem to like Wal-Mart.
While 53 percent of people who described themselves as liberal Democrats said they have an unfavorable opinion of Wal-Mart, 70 percent of those who called themselves conservative or moderate Democrats had a favorable impression of the company. So did 65 percent of independents, and 73 percent of Republicans.
On other aspects of Wal-Mart’s business, 53 percent of liberal Democrats agreed with the statement that Wal-mart is “a bad place to work.” But majorities of everybody else — 57 percent of conservative and moderate Democrats, 56 percent of independents, and 64 percent of Republicans — said Wal-Mart is a good place to work.
And on the basic question of whether Wal-Mart is good or bad for the country, a plurality of liberal Democrats — 44 percent — told Pew that the company has a bad effect on the United States. But solid majorities of everybody else — 64 percent of conservative and moderate Democrats, 67 percent of independents, and 71 percent of Republicans — think Wal-Mart has a good effect on the country.
The bottom line is that liberal Democrats — and virtually nobody else — believe Wal-Mart is bad for America.
How does one make a winning campaign out of that? “This one eludes me completely,” says a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous.
“All these guys who make $200,000 a year and live in Washington think it’s a bad idea for Wal-mart to save their customers thousands of dollars a yearŠSometimes our party is more interested in punishing those who have gotten ahead than it is in helping those who could really use a hand up.”
Attacking Wal-Mart now is particularly bad strategy, adds David Winston, a pollster who has worked with many top Republicans. “In an environment where the cost of living has turned into a significant issue — health care, gas prices — to then go after a business that provides lower-income people with the ability to buy goods at a price they can afford is an interesting approach to politics,” Winston says wryly.
So why are all those Democratic candidates joining the anti-Wal-Mart crusade? Because they are likely listening more to their union supporters — a critical part of any Democratic coalition — than to the majority of voters.
Wake Up Wal-Mart is the creation of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which has been in ugly organizing battles with Wal-Mart in California and elsewhere. A number of studies purporting to show Wal-Mart’s negative effects on the economy have been produced by unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). And the unions have attacked Wal-Mart in other ways as well, such as promoting last year’s documentary “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.”
Those same unions play a big role in picking the next Democratic nominee for president. And service unions, particularly — the kind that would like to organize Wal-Mart workers — are on the ascendant. “In presidential politics, there are two labor organizations that matter,” explains the anonymous Democratic strategist. “One is the Service Employees International Union, and the other is the [old-line] AFL-CIO, and SEIU now matters more than AFL-CIO. And for SEIU, this is the way to drive membership. If they could ever organize Wal-Mart employees, they would be bigger and stronger than ever. That’s the play.”
It stands to reason that Wal-Mart might be an issue in internal Democratic power struggles. But on the campaign trail? Some Democrats seem to have forgotten that the stores, with their millions and millions of customers, are everywhere. There are more than 3,800 Wal-Marts in the United States, meaning there is no state and virtually no congressional district without a Wal-Mart. In the Pew poll, even liberal Democrats (62 percent) characterized Wal-Mart as a “good place to shop.”
But there is no Wal-Mart in Hollywood. There is no Wal-Mart on the Upper East Side or Upper West Side of Manhattan — indeed, in all of New York City. There is no Wal-Mart in Washington, DC. The political classes who live in those places, and who have a perhaps disproportionate effect on the thinking of some Democratic candidates, have no regular, first-hand contact with the company. So they think going after Wal-Mart will be a big boost for them. Sooner or later, they’re likely to learn otherwise.
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