Back in September, when the United Auto Workers went on strike against the Big Three carmakers, the pundit-Republican chatter was tiresomely predictable: It surely would be Bad for Biden.
The president was pushing hard for the conversion to electric cars (to reduce greenhouse emissions), but the UAW was spooked about that. The union wanted job guarantees and hefty wage hikes. As the Associated Press reported in September, “Two of Biden’s top goals – fighting climate change and expanding the middle class by supporting unions — are colliding in the key battleground state of Michigan. (The strike) is a sharp test of Biden’s ability to hold together an expansive and discordant political coalition while running for reelection.”
Well, Biden just passed the test.
No surprise there. If only more Americans would recognize the obvious – that this guy is the most successful domestic-policy president since FDR or LBJ – we wouldn’t be sweating out the electoral possibilities in ’24, entertaining the notion that a criminal sociopath might squat again in the Oval.
In the newly announced tentative agreements forged with the three carmakers, the UAW got virtually everything it wanted on the income front – including wage hikes roughly double the rate of inflation – and, perhaps most notably, contract provisions that will protect the workers in the slow but steady shift to electric vehicles. (The share of EV purchases, as a percentage of all car sales, has more than tripled since 2020). Two key Biden officials, senior advisor Gene Sterling and acting Labor secretary Julie Su, worked behind the scenes to help nurture the UAW-carmaker negotiating process – and Biden became the first president to walk a picket line, spending his political capital on the union.
Result: Biden wins two ways.
His environmental agenda gets a boost, because now the union and the carmakers are on the same page about electric vehicles. One of the carmakers, formerly known as Chrysler, is even reopening a shuttered plant to make electric batteries, which dovetails with Biden’s creation, via his Inflation Reduction Act, of the first nationwide EV charging network.
And his economic agenda gets a boost, because he’s been saying all along – to any Americans who’ve bothered to listen – that the best way to boost the economy is to build it “from the bottom up and the middle out,” by investing heavily in the middle and working classes, by fostering the creation of “good union jobs.” The UAW agreements – if ratified, as expected – are Exhibit A. Biden literally put himself on the line, picketing with the union to demonstrate his “middle out” convictions, a tactic that carried some political risk. He told the strikers, “You’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now,” and now he’s been vindicated. And he has real proof that environmental and economic priorities are by no means mutually exclusive.
By contrast, the default Republican stance is still “trickle-down economics,” the archaic Reagan-era mantra that largesse for the little people flows from the top down, from the denizens of the one percent who, in the last 40 years, have amassed an ever greater share of the national wealth. And in stark contrast to the president, Trump took a break in September from his court trials and trekked to Michigan to warn workers that if electric cars keep getting built, “in three years there will be no autoworker jobs” – and he told that lie at a non-union factory. Pathetic.
So, the big question: Will Biden reap sufficient credit for actually delivering on his promises, for fostering big gains in median net worth and the GDP (which grew at an annual pace of 4.9% in the most recent quarter, a spike that Trump and Barack Obama never achieved), for making unprecedented investments in domestic manufacturing via his bipartisan laws? Will he get any credit for the fact that wage gains are finally exceeding inflation?
Who the hell knows. Millions of Americans still seem to think they’re paying $5 for a gallon of gas; millions more are simply exhausted by the news and don’t keep up; millions more, forever in thrall to a criminal defendant, simply don’t believe the news … the real news, like the historic pacts just forged in Michigan. But perhaps a sufficient share of the electorate is still tethered to reality. Everything we value rides on that.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2023
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