October 4, 2007

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AFT Endorses Hillary Clinton: Blog Roundup

Filed under: Labor by Steve Perez @ 5:30 pm

Blogs are reacting to the AFT endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president:

Chris Bowers at Open Left calls it, “the biggest endorsement of the campaign for me so far.”

The AFT has played a major, positive role in my life from before I was born. In fact, I can’t think of any other political organization that has played such a positive role. Few things anger me more than right-wing attacks on teacher’s unions, because it is hard for me to imagine a group of people who are harder working and more dedicated to making a positive difference in people’s lives while simultaneously passing up major monetary and career opportunities that their extensive educations would otherwise grant them. I know AFT people, both the teachers and the organizers. They are friends, family and colleagues. They are smart, extremely hard working, and also very progressive. I trust the decisions they make. If they decide to endorse Hillary Clinton, that means a lot to me, just as it meant a lot to me when they endorsed Barack Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senate primary before pretty much any other unions did so. The AFT endorsement of Hillary Clinton improves my image of Hillary Clinton.


Here’s TPM Election Central:

The drumbeat of good Hillary news just isn’t stopping today: The latest is that she’s picking up the endorsement of the American Federation of Teachers.

Garance Franke-Ruta at Tapped offers this analysis:

The move was long expected for three reasons: Clinton’s historic commitment to and advocacy work around the education of children have given her deep relationships in the education community; the largest AFT affiliate is based in New York; and more than three-fourths of teachers are female.

Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic reports, “a union source says the vote for Hillary was ‘overwhelming.’”

Liz Benjamin at Daily Politics looks at the timing:

The New York contingent, which is the largest state organization in the AFT, lobbied hard on the part of its “favorite daughter” - a status the union conferred on Clinton back in April - while Illinois, the second-largest, did the same on behalf of its designated “favorite son,” Barack Obama.

The argument, Ianuzzi said, was less about whether Clinton should be the AFT’s candidate, since 45 percent of the union’s likely voters favor her, according to a poll conducted by Peter Hart Associates (Obama got 21, John Edwards received 13), and more about whether it would be more appropriate to delay the endorsement altogether to see if some other frontrunner emerges.

The Council isn’t scheduled to meet again until February, Ianuzzi noted, by which point, at the rate things are going, the Democratic nomination contest could be good and over.

Additional coverage at Politico, The Caucus (with a picture), Time’s Real Clear Politics, MSNBC’s First Read (and here), Capitol Confidential, Politics on the Hudson and to many more to list.

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