Wisconsin standoff a golden opportunity for Obama to solidify labor support

The White House is pushing back hard against reports President Obama is meddling in the Wisconsin labor unions’ battle with Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Chalk that up as a missed opportunity.

{mosads}In Madison right now, there is energy and organization, two assets Obama will need if he wants to win the state in 2012.

Obama will not win Wisconsin (or Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and other swing states) purely on the support of Big Labor. But he will almost certainly lose without it.

And the standoff in Madison presents Obama with a golden opportunity to solidify that support.

The president has spoken out against Republicans’ plans to repeal the collective bargaining rights of state employees, and Organizing for America (OFA), his political arm, has sent an e-mail to its massive list to gin up support for the unions.

Officials in Wisconsin say that limited intervention was welcome but hardly noticeable in the already frenzied environment.

More help from Obama, they said, would be welcome but not necessary. Not necessary for labor, that is.

“It obviously wouldn’t hurt, and we’d take it and be psyched,” said one union official. “But people are so fired up and so ready to fight back against attacks on them, I don’t know if they would even get that much more excited.”

In other words: Labor doesn’t need Obama. But the president will certainly need labor.

If Obama were to get in front of the movement, squaring off with Walker on behalf of the unions, he could get an early start on harnessing the energy and organization rocking the capitol in Madison.

But the relationship between the White House and Big Labor has become frayed, especially given the president’s recent courtship of the business community.

And the president has not been able or willing to deliver on some of labor’s biggest priorities since taking office. Elements of labor were unhappy with his unwillingness to go to bat for it on the union-organizing “card-check” legislation, his abandonment of the public option in healthcare reform and his willingness to make trade deals. Also, recent Obama moves toward the political center, such as extending the George W. Bush-era tax cuts across the board instead of just to lower-income families, have infuriated union officials.

It’s one thing to use the professional left as a punching-bag to help create the perception Obama is a moderate. It’s quite another thing to tick off the party’s most reliably well-organized foot soldiers.

And this is about more than just optics. At stake for unions in Wisconsin (and other swing states) are critical functions, not least of which is collecting union dues from public employees.

Big Labor has been ailing for years, but Democrats in Washington see a real chance for a catastrophic crippling of unions’ political clout if Walker is successful.

There is — without question — a significant risk for Obama in being seen as overstepping his federal bounds and interfering with a state budget and its budget-cutting, rising Republican star of a governor. 

Then there’s the self-described “shellacking” the president’s party took at the polls in 2010 as voters showed their preference for Republicans’ plans to cut spending. The president, almost daily, is trying to show he’s serious about it too.

Republicans have been thrilled to blast Obama for interfering in state budget affairs, leading White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer to tell The New York Times over the weekend that “this is a Wisconsin story, not a Washington one.”

Pfeiffer is half right. It is a Wisconsin story, for now. But it will spread, and it will spread to the states where presidential elections are won.

It’s definitely a high-wire act as the White House balances Obama the Candidate’s need for labor support with Obama the President’s calls for cutting spending.

But people in Wisconsin are picking sides, and union officials in the state said that Republicans there are energizing Democrats in ways unseen since Obama won the state in a landslide in 2008.

“In the past six days, the Republicans have done more to build our 2012 field operation than we could’ve done in months,” one union official said.

Sounds like something Obama might want to get in on.

Youngman is the White House correspondent for The Hill. This is his weekly column, Obama’s Bid for Reelection.