Judged by the standard of Sweeney's own highly charged rhetoric the campaign was a failure. Only minor gains were made in the House. Newt Gingrich remains the speaker and will appoint the chairs of the committees which control the legislative process. The Senate is marginally more Republican than before. But then what could we have expected? The Federation concentrated on districts which were marginal. And that meant that even had the plan succeeded in its own terms the benefits for labor would have been minimal if there were any benefits at all. A representative from a marginal district is not about to stick his or her neck out on controversial issue like banning "replacement workers" (the current politically correct euphemism for scabs) or health care reform. For all the rhetoric, Sweeney's project was less of a challenge to business as usual than was Kirkland's 1984 gamble.

But that is only half the story. The fact that labor was doing something publicly sparked real enthusiasm in the activist core of the movement and among the liberal sympathizers of labor. By 1996 the American Labor movement was in bad shape politically. Kirkland's 1984 victory had turned to ashes. Having won the Democratic Party nomination for Mondale as Labor's man, Kirkland and the rest of the leadership, like Dr. Frankenstein, took fright at their own handiwork. Too close an identification with Labor - a "special interest" - meant certain defeat for Mondale and the Party. Thirty-five or forty percent of the popular vote would be an enormous success for an opposition party. For a patronage machine like the Democrats it would be a disaster. The AFL-CIO leadership disappeared from the scene and pretended they had never heard of Mondale. He returned the favor. For the next dozen years Kirkland abandoned the public arena. He and the rest of the AFL-CIO leaders concentrated on making deals in back rooms inside the Washington Beltway. Their reward was Bill Clinton. As President, he treated Labor with as much contempt as Reagan. Even Richard Nixon had been better on Labor issues than Clinton. Then, in 1994, the roof caved in. The Republicans swept the House and Senate.

And what Republicans! This new draft explicitly repudiated the old cold war consensus on the welfare state which Reagan never did. The effect was similar to Margaret Thatcher's purge of the wet Tories. Some of the most conservative labor leaders openly called for a reconsideration of Labor's political alliance with the Democrats. The words "Labor Party", previously the exclusive, copyrighted, slogan of left sects, now spontaneously sprang to the lips of hardened bureaucrats who had never heard of Leon Trotsky (well, at least not for a long time). What was more important these phrases resonated with a union rank-and-file that was tired of losing strike after strike while liberal Democrats fought the cultural wars over politically correct slogans. The American working class, organized and unorganized, were looking for a change.

What they got was John Sweeney. According to the New York Times, which has covered his rise with a degree of sympathy that has raised questions in my, admittedly skeptical, mind, Sweeney was a Democratic Party hack before he became a labor leader. That was his career ladder. While the SEIU itself is a large union covering a bewildering variety of trades in the government and service industries with a membership entertaining correspondingly diverse political views, Sweeney himself never whispered the slightest criticism of Kirkland's political cowardice at home or his militantly anticommunist politics abroad. The only discernible difference between Sweeney and the old leadership is that Lane Kirkland and his chosen successor Tom Donahue were the ones on the bridge in 1994 when the ship hit the iceberg. In particular, Sweeney was definitely not one of those raising questions about Labor's political strategy. Sweeney's actions since coming to office can be rationally explained in only one way. He saw his mission as that of the man called to put the genie back in the bottle.

So far, Sweeney has been successful. Liberal academics, frightened by the specter of the populist anger among workers and the lower middle class evoked by the Perot and Buchanan campaigns, have responded with relief to the return of the AFL-CIO (or at least its leadership) to the good old "New Deal coalition" of all progressive minded people. One manifestation of this euphoria was a Columbia University symposium one of whose star attractions was Betty Friedan. Ms. Friedan is one of the more moderate leaders of the American feminist movement. Her other claim to fame is that she has been a Democratic Party hack even longer than Sweeney has. The gathering modeled itself, according to its own press releases, on the "Teach-ins" of the Vietnam era. What the organizers forgot was that the antiwar movement was a revolt against precisely that New Deal liberalism which Sweeney (and Friedan) espouse. There has been no echo of this symposium in the country. But Sweeney has been successful inside the Labor movement too.

For a number of years now Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers has been quietly and steadfastly recruiting trade union activists and secondary leaders to Labor Party Advocates. Unlike the various left sects that have long advocated an immediate break with the Democrats in favor of a "Labor Party" which either does not exist or is a front for the particular sect in question, Mazzocchi has built an organization dedicated to propagandizing inside the existing structures of the union movement for an independent party of Labor. After Clinton spearheaded the drive to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement without the protections sought by environmentalists and labor, LPA began to pick up steam. The 1994 electoral disaster and the resulting chaos at the top of the AFL-CIO added more steam. Sweeney, very shortly after his election, moved to turn off the valve. His 35 million dollar campaign was meant as an alternative to the growing disgust with the Democrats. At its convention this summer LPA did the only thing it could. It declined at this time to directly challenge the Sweeney leadership. Anything else would have meant the immediate demise of the organization.

Sweeney, unlike Kirkland, is not yet discredited. The overwhelming majority of trade unionist activists (but no longer the majority of the working class) still sees the Democrats as the only choice. Sweeney's successful derailing of the Labor revolt against Clinton and the Democrats was Labor's real defeat in this election. What about next year? Americans are still disillusioned with the present party structure. The majority do not vote and the turnout this time was the lowest in decades. Meanwhile, the real economic conditions of the majority of the people continue to decline. The anger that fueled Buchanan and Perot is still there and it will grow. The second Clinton administration will be an even more corrupt farce than the first. The combination of a Republican congress and a Democratic President will make sure nothing happens. "Washington" will continue to be a synonym for corruption and incompetence. John Sweeney is part of that corruption. He wasted the enthusiasm and dedication of the membership that threw itself into this campaign.

Ernie Haberkern can be contacted at 100545.1343@compuserve.com