John Edwards 2008: What’s not to like

The Gilded Age was a dark period in American politics, John Edwards recalls. Back before Teddy Roosevelt fought for reforms, he told a Nov. 26 town meeting in Bow, a few families wielded disproportionate power.

“The Rockefellers and the Mellons and the Carnegies, all these people, owned most of America or a big chunk of America and they used their money and power to dominate what was happening in the government and to dominate what was happening in the economy,” he said.

Edwards has often invoked Roosevelt on the stump as a hero and railed against the influence of money in politics. But at the same time, it appears that the pro-Edwards movement has had a huge infusion of cash from the old Mellon fortune.

Turns out, the labor-linked, pro-Edwards 527 that’s been running ads in Iowa and spreading pamphlets in New Hampshire has deep-pocketed friends outside of unions.

The single largest donor to the Alliance for a New America, according to new FEC reports, is a mysterious LLC registered to New York City’s high-end Essex House hotel. (We called the room listed as the source of the $495,000 check and got an automated voicemail: “The person in this room is not available to take your call. . .”)

According to reporting elsewhere, the group, Oak Spring Farms LLC, is linked to New York lawyer and Edwards backer Alexander Forger, who holds power of attorney over 97-year-old Rachel Lambert Mellon, the daughter-in-law of industrialist and banker Andrew Mellon.

Mellon and her deceased husband, Paul, had a farm called Oak Spring; property records in Virginia refer to it as Oak Spring Farms LLC.

In 2006, when the New York Sun reported on a $250,000 contribution from Oak Spring Farms LLC to Edwards’s One America Committee, Forger declined to say where the money came from.

“I’m simply acting on behalf of somebody else,” he said then.

Edwards has made a campaign issue out of kicking special interests out of politics and often cites his pledge not to take any money from lobbyists. He’s said he would outlaw 527s if he’s elected.

The Alliance for a New America 527 is advised by Nick Baldick, who managed Edwards’s 2004 campaign.

Concord Monitor 12/30/07

Obama objected last week to the Alliance for a New America, which is run by Edwards’ former campaign manager and partially funded by local unions affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. The locals have endorsed Edwards.After Obama objected to the group last week, which now is running television ads in the state, Edwards said he had only just learned about it and called for a halt to its activities.

The argument gained new fuel Thursday, however, when a memo from October surfaced that summarized a conference call among the union locals that outlined several steps they planned to take.

Among them was general agreement that a 527 political group would likely be set up. A 527 is a political committee that can raise larger sums of money than typical political committees. The memo also said there were plans “to discuss with the Edwards campaign what specific sort of support they’d like to see from us.”

Coordination between 527 political groups and campaigns is heavily restricted, although some discussions are legal.

On Friday, The New York Times, which first broke the story about the memo, reported that campaign finance watchdogs were raising questions about the legality of the activity.

An official representing the union locals said Friday it has followed the law and it is inaccurate and “reckless” to link the memo to the Alliance’s activities.

“This was just a thought piece sent out by a leader inside of SEIU. It was an internal memo. It specifically said it had to be vetted with our legal team,” said Dave Regan, the president of SEIU District 1199, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, and includes members from Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia. “Everything that we’ve done absolutely complies with all legal requirements.”

An Edwards spokesman also said there was no wrongdoing.
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WASHINGTON: An investment fund for philanthropist Rachel Mellon contributed $495,000 to a labor-backed group that is running ads in Iowa in support of Democrat John Edwards’ presidential campaign.

A Federal Election Commission filing by the Alliance for a New America reported the donation from Oak Spring Farms LLC, the corporate entity that holds Mellon’s fortune. Mellon is the 97-year-old widow of philanthropist Paul Mellon, the son of industrialist Andrew Mellon.

Rachel Mellon contributed the maximum $4,600 allowed to Edwards’ campaign earlier this year.

Alexander Forger, a lawyer listed in New York city property records as holding power of attorney for Mellon, lists himself in FEC records as director of Oak Springs Farm LLC. He also has contributed the maximum $4,600 allowed to Edwards’ campaign.

Oak Spring Farm LLC contributed $250,000 last year to a nonprofit political group that Edwards set up called One America.

Forger did not immediately respond to e-mail and telephone messages.

Both One America and the Alliance for a New America are “527″ corporations, nonprofit groups that can carry out some political activity but have come under scrutiny by the FEC for their advertising during past presidential campaigns. They derive their name, “527,” from the section of the IRS code that authorizes them.

The Alliance for a New America is a newly created organization headed by former Edwards adviser Nick Baldick. It has received most of its support from labor groups, many of them locals belonging to the Service Employees International Union. The alliance is spending about $600,000 on radio ads and about $750,000 on television ads in Iowa supporting Edwards.

Edwards is also getting support from another 527 group, Working for Working Americans, that is financed by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and is running television ads supporting Edwards in Iowa.

Such groups are not allowed to coordinate their efforts with a political campaign. Edwards aides have said there has been no such coordination, and Edwards himself has called on the 527 to stop its activities. But in an interview on Radio Iowa Thursday, Edwards also said he was proud of the support from the SEIU, carpenters and steel workers unions that are backing him.

“There are some things that when a union supports you can work with them on and some things that you can’t, and we have been absolutely in complete compliance with the law, both the letter and the spirit of the law,” he said.

Dave Regan, president of SEIU District 1199, one of the groups financing the Alliance for a New America, said:

“We are pleased to help support this organization and have allies who believe that issues like universal health care, the well-being of the middle-class and a strong economy warrant a positive discussion.”

Associated Press 12/28/07

A handful of local Service Employees International Union affiliates have banded together to form a third-party advocacy group championing many of the same issues emphasized by former senator John Edwards in his presidential campaign.

The Alliance for a New America’s stated goal, according to its Web site, it to “ask the candidates how they will make the middle class and working Americans their top priority in Washington, while ensuring that special interests and corporate America lose their stranglehold on our government.”

To that end, the group, which is incorporated under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, will begin running radio ads in Iowa this week featuring a nurse named Beth Junk. “For years, the insurance companies, drug companies and their Washington lobbyists have blocked reform,” Junk says in an obvious echo of Edwards’s rhetoric on the stump. “It’s time someone had a plan to take them on.” The ad’s narrator goes on to provide details of Edwards’s plan.

The ads are being financed by six local branches of SEIU — two in California, two in Minnesota and one each in Oregon and Ohio. The Chicago branch of United Here is also involved in the effort. Nick Baldick, who managed Edwards’s presidential campaign in 2004 but is not involved in his campaign this time around, is serving as an adviser to the group.

To date, the Alliance for a New America has raised nearly $850,000 and spent $590,000 — all of it on the radio ads. In addition to the radio campaign, the organization is planning a direct-mail program in Iowa and has not ruled out the possibility of television ads as well.

Another pro-Edwards 527 — Working for Working Families — launched TV ads in Iowa late last week touting Edwards’s call to eliminate tax breaks for companies who move jobs offshore. That group is affiliated with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, according to forms filed Friday with the IRS.

Washington Post 12/16/07

snip: Several hundred UAW delegates rose to their feet and cheered when John Edwards had his soft-spoken parents stand and wave.

Edwards was the last of a string of Democratic presidential candidates to speak at the conference, which began Monday. All are seeking an endorsement from the Midwestern UAW delegates, which is expected to come today.

snip: Edwards repeatedly referred to the delegates as “brothers and sisters.” He vowed that if he were elected president, he would stand on the White House lawn and explain to Americans how important unions have been to the development of a middle class.

DesMoines Register

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071115/NEWS/711150404/1001/NEWS

In 1998, while running for the Senate, Edwards did not come out in favor of repealing right-to-work laws in North Carolina, and he has only opposed a national right-to-work law. While North Carolina is hardly considered to be a labor stronghold, the former senator’s record and his relationship with some unions in the state were used by some unions to judge him as unworthy of an endorsement.

The International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), which endorsed Sen. Chris Dodd (Conn.), said Edwards’s unwillingness to advocate a repeal of the right-to-work measure was a sticking point for the membership when it was seriously considering supporting the former senator’s bid.

“How do you walk picket lines and be for right-to-work?” Jeffrey Zack, an IAFF official, said. “It’s surprising that it wasn’t disconcerting to more people.

“Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s results. It’s not what you say. It’s results.”

Edwards has also come under fire for his support for normalizing trade relations with China after he was elected to the Senate and for voting for fast-track authority for the president. Edwards has said since that he regrets both votes, and Wednesday he told the UAW in Iowa that he would reverse trade policies.

Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) were clearly impressed with Edwards when he addressed the group this summer, but members from North Carolina and his past positions on trade and right-to-work were ultimately what led them to endorse Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) instead, officials said.

“He walked out of there completely convinced he had our endorsement,” IAM official Rick Sloan said. “What he failed to realize was the jury was still out.

“I think he makes an exceptional closing argument. If that was all the jury ever heard, he’d win every time. But it’s not.”

Sloan said Edwards appeared to be “the natural for us,” but the former senator made some missteps with the North Carolina IAM members who worked to elect him, and his support for normalizing trade with China and right-to-work in his home state cost him.

“These days he’s sounding like Johnny Tremain helping a modern-day Paul Revere going around saying, ‘The Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming,’ ” Sloan said. “Well, they are — by his gold-plated invitation.”

Sloan added that in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, IAM members who worked for U.S. Air in Charlotte, N.C., were losing their jobs in the wake of lost revenues and corporate cutbacks.

“When our guys were getting laid off after 9/11, he came down and met with the company” instead of the workers, Sloan said.

“Our guys in North Carolina worked really hard to get him there and then didn’t see much of him,” Sloan said, adding that the right-to-work issue is “the highest priority for the labor movement.”

The Hill 11/15/07
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/unions-balk–at-edwards-track-record-2007-11-15.html

Look out, John Edwards. That endorsement you got from the State Employees Association, a local SEIU affiliate, might be revisited yet again.

Edwards was caught in a crossfire last week between SEA leaders and dissidents who argued that Barack Obama was the executive board’s real choice.

It will take some slick parliamentary maneuvering for SEA President Gary Smith to block a discussion of this mess when the union’s convention resumes Nov. 17.

The short version of all this is that the union’s executive board voted Oct 23 to endorse Obama, 7-5. The Associated Press reported last week that the union actually called Obama to tell him the news.

A week later, Smith essentially calls for a do-over and breaks a tie vote to send the endorsement to Edwards.

In between was an SEA annual convention that was so tied up in an unscheduled membership straw poll on the issue that it never finished its regular business.

The straw poll ended with 50 undecideds, 23 votes for Edwards, 19 for Obama and 14 for Hillary Clinton.

So the delegates convene again Nov. 17. The meeting is also open to the rest of SEA’s 10,000 members who don’t get a vote.

Jay Ward, SEA political director, said the endorsement is meant to give members direction on candidates. Edwards was at the front all along, and Obama people are just upset, he said.

As for Edwards’ small straw poll numbers, Ward said, “that reflects the kinds of numbers that have been seen among the general electorate.”

Stephen Foster, a board member who was voted out last week, describes the whole affair as “a hijacking of the board.”

He predicted a donnybrook when union members meet again.

“I’m hearing all kinds of questions, and staff at the office say they are being inundated with e-mail and phone calls,” he said. “This is all a sham.”

Union Leader 11/4/07
http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=State+House+Dome%3A+Battle+expected+over+SEA’s+Edwards+endorsement&articleId=68ff51d4-c9a2-48ff-ba16-71a5d0fb52a4

If State Employees Association leadership hoped its endorsement of Edwards last week would joyfully erase its star-crossed choice four years earlier, it sure got off to a rocky start.The pick had been weeks in the making, as union leaders originally desired to introduce the chosen one at its statewide convention in Nashua on Oct. 27.
Imagine what Obama was thinking just after stepping off the stage of an Oct. 23 Boston rally with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to take a celebratory call from SEA President Gary Smith that the executive board favored him 7-5.

By now, you may know the rest, as www.nashuatelegraph.com first reported. Only a week later, Smith was casting the tiebreaking vote to deliver the endorsement to Edwards by a 9-8 count.

Some troubling questions remain:

• Why would the SEA have four voting members with seats both on the Political Education Committee that reviewed the candidates and the executive board that made the final decision?

• Whether it affected the outcome or not, how do you have one secret-ballot vote on Oct. 23 with one group of directors and the second vote on Oct. 30 with four new board members elected only three days earlier?

• If the national SEIU leadership stayed out of the New Hampshire flip-flop to Edwards, as SEA leaders insist, was it appropriate to have President Andy Stern working the room at the state convention in Nashua? At that event, Edwards narrowly won a nonbinding vote of the rank and file over Obama 23-19, with Clinton picking up 14 and about 50 choosing no one.

After all, it was Stern who only six weeks ago said Edwards “had the edge’’ to get the national’s backing until his own union’s leadership balked and released all locals to make their own decisions.

Even close friends of Smith within the SEA shook their heads at a chief executive they say remained scrupulously impartial right up until the revote, and earlier had privately told associates his favorite candidate was Obama.

Nashua Telegraph 11/4/07
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071104/COLUMNISTS12/71104049/-1/columnists

According to those involved, the union’s board voted Oct. 23 to endorse Sen. Barack Obama. Union president Gary Smith promptly called Obama with the news.A person familiar with the conversation said it was clear to Obama that the endorsement was a done deal. The person did not want to be named because the conversation was meant to be private.

But the situation changed Tuesday night.

The board, including some new members elected during the weekend, deadlocked 8-to-8 on a motion to endorse Edwards. Smith broke the tie in Edwards’ favor.

snip

Jay Ward, the union’s director, acknowledged the board’s 7-to-5 vote on Oct. 23 for Obama. But he said the executive board returned a day later and wanted to reconsider, especially with the union’s annual convention scheduled later that week.

In a straw poll at the convention, 50 union members said they were undecided or favored no immediate endorsement. Edwards got 23 votes, Obama 19 and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton 14.

That didn’t sit well with Stephen Foster, a board member until Saturday who considered last week’s vote for Obama final.

“The vote was taken and the chair announced that we had a presidential endorsement for Senator Obama. The board then authorized him to call Senator Obama and convey the news,” Foster said. “That should serve as evidence that the sense and intent of the board was clearly in play without question at that time.”

Alanat News 11/4/07
http://www.alanat.com/politics/questions-arise-on-john-edwards-seiu-endorsement-4/

I sat in on a conference call hosted by the John Edwards campaign yesterday. The purpose of the call was to trumpet Edwards’ winning the endorsement of the Iowa chapter of the SEIU, comprised of about 2,000 members statewide. Among the participants were national campaign manager and former congressman David Bonior, communications director Chris Kofinis, Iowa state director Jennifer O’Malley-Dillon, and other senior staff.

snip

So, yes, all of those things are true. And still none of them can erase the central and overriding fact that John Edwards’ not winning the SEIU national endorsement is, quite simply, not winning. It is losing. There is no victory in getting 10 state SEIU chapters to support you when you have spent more than three years working to win the combined support of all 50 state chapters in the form of a national endorsement; far from it. It is a defeat of the first magnitude.

Similarly, Edwards’ announcement late last month that he is opting in to public financing of his campaign, and thereby accepting the spending limits that are a condition of receiving federal matching dollars, was not, as he told CNN, “taking a stand, a principled stand, and I believe in public financing.” This belief would seem to have come to Edwards late in a year when he has been working as hard as anyone to raise campaign cash, and just happened to precede by a few days definitive confirmation that his fundraising numbers have dropped alarmingly from earlier quarters. A victory for principle, or a triumph of spin?

So it is that the Iowa SEIU “victory” extends John Edwards’ summer slump into the autumn, and, as much as anything, serves to highlight the extent to which the Edwards campaign continues to fall short of achieving every single one of its major goals. One has to wonder how many more such victories his campaign can survive.

iPol 10/15/07
http://ipol-2008.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-many-more-victories-can-john.html

John Edwards suffered a blow last week when the the Service Employees International Union decided it would make no national endorsement in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination. But his concerted effort to embrace causes espoused by the labor group — which represents a wide swath of healthcare workers, as well as janitors, various government employees and others — has paid off after all.

SEIU leaders at the state level were given free rein to back a candidate, and early today Edwards was rewarded with the nod from the Iowa chapter. Every little bit helps in the state where the nomination battle officially begins, but the union is not exactly a heavy hitter in Iowa — it boasts only about 2,000 members.

Turns out, though, the move by the Iowans was simply the start of a deluge. This afternoon, SEIU chapters in nine states signed up to help Edwards — including California (656,000 members), Washington state (103,000 members), Michigan (70,000 members) and Oregon (46,000 members).

snip

Even as Edwards basks in such comments, the ghosts of Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean must haunt his campaign in Iowa. In the 2004 Democratic primary fight, Gephardt’s effort in Iowa was powered — almost solely, as it turned out — by support from the nation’s older unions. Dean, meanwhile, had secured the national backing of the SEIU and other newer labor organizations.

Both men saw their presidential hopes effectively end with poor showings in the Iowa caucuses (the surprise of Edwards’ second-place finish was topped only by John Kerry capturing first place). So will it be different this time around? Will help from key labor activists translate into a better result for their candidate on caucus night?

In Edwards’ case, it just might. After running — and doing well — in Iowa last time around, he has done a good job of maintaining a network of loyalists. Aides with other Democratic campaigns, in moments of candor, give the Edwards’ operation a tip of the hat, largely due to the intensity of his backing. So, potentially, the SEIU members who travel to Iowa from Los Angeles and Seattle and Detroit and elsewhere will plug into an efficient, well-oiled network that knows how to make effective use of their time and energy.

It would seem that the Edwards plan for derailing the Hillary Clinton express and overcoming the enthusiasm Obama generates would hinge on such a scenario.

Los Angeles Times 10/15/07
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2007/10/state-by-state-.html

John Edwards spent four years positioning himself to be labor’s candidate, walking picket lines.

But his efforts did not secure the coveted backing of the 1.9-million-member Service Employees International Union, one of the country’s largest labor federations, which decided last week not to make a national endorsement for the Democratic primaries.

The decision reflects skepticism about Edwards’s ability to capture the nomination, as well as the influence of large SEIU memberships in Illinois and New York, which back their home-state candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, respectively. The SEIU’s move also shows the aggressive efforts by all the candidates to court labor and address their key issues.

snip: For Edwards, the absence of a national SEIU endorsement will likely have ripple effects on the decisions of other unions, according to political observers. Months ago, leaders of Change to Win, a coalition of seven unions totaling 6 million members, including SEIU and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, thought they could make a unanimous endorsement for the primary. In August, Edwards had already clinched one of the coalition’s unions, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, with 500,000 members. But the SEIU decision makes a single endorsement by the coalition unlikely, said Change to Win spokesman Chris Ortman.

So far, Edwards has backing from unions representing more than 2 million members, but he is well behind Clinton, who has won support from national and regional unions totaling almost 4 million members.

Boston.com

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/10/14/edwards_fails_to_capture_endorsement_from_union/