With less than three months until Election Day, here's the bottom line for every activist in the progressive movement: the only thing that matters is returning power to the people of this country. From the Iraq War to skyrocketing health care costs to privatization attacks on Social Security, Republican Party rule has been a disaster for America.
Everything we progressives do in the next few months must be done with an eye toward tossing these guys out in November. And that requires two things. First, we must get more people involved.
For our part, AFSCME just passed our "21st Century Initiative," which gives us the resources to begin mobilizing a 40,000-member army of volunteers to register 90 percent of our 1.4 million members to vote and turn them out on Election Day. In addition, we'll commit unprecedented resources to our "labor-to-neighbor" strategy, targeting union members, their families and friends.
Second, we must put our broader goals above our individual interests. And sometimes, that will mean making some tough decisions on issues near and dear to the hearts of individual groups within our movement.
For example, last week the Republicans tried to put us in a box. In the Senate, GOP leaders attached a minimum wage hike to a measure that would have repealed the estate tax. They hoped to divide enough Democrats to eek out a victory for their obscene tax cut - which some have rightly dubbed the Paris Hilton tax cut.
Now, anyone who knows the labor movement knows that raising the minimum wage is a top legislative priority for us. Even though the overwhelming majority of union members make far more than the minimum wage, we have long known that a higher minimum wage benefits all American workers. The Republican Congress' happy willingness to turn its back on the working poor for more than a decade is morally sickening.
Even so, last week I worked with Democrats in Congress to successfully oppose this Republican sham because working Americans saw through the GOP dirty tricks. They knew that, though the bill would have raised the minimum wage, it would have, among other things, starved funding for vital public services that the working poor need to survive.
Don't be surprised if the GOP this gimmick with other progressive agenda items in the coming weeks. They know we are right on the issues. And they figure we'll be too busy fight amongst ourselves for the bone or two that they throw us to unite against them.
As we did last week on the estate tax, we must make sure they don't succeed. Instead, we must unite and focus like a laser beam on putting the Democrats in power.
And when we do, we will win a real minimum wage hike - on our terms.