Labor Issues Take Back Seat To Process Questions

Sunday’s United Food and Commercial Workers forum in Altoona was supposed to be focused on labor issues. In the hall, with several hundred labor union members seated in the audience, it was. Outside, not so much.

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who’s had a tough time polling over 3%, said “I don’t know, I don’t know,” when reporters asked him why certain candidates haven’t broken through in early voting states.

“That I would not have expected,” Bennet said of the largely static field. “I think that in these campaigns, generally the folks that begin leading the races are not the ones who end up winning the races in New Hampshire and Iowa.”

Bennet has a strong labor background and has supported unions for years, but journalists gathered at the UFCW forum didn’t pay much attention to his policies that could be key in 2020 swing states.

For the most part, reporters weren’t paying attention to labor issues at all.

They were focused on asking the candidates questions about Hunter Biden, Syria and the impeachment process.

Journalists were kept in a room separate from the event at Prairie Meadows Event Center. A livestream of the UFCW forum played on a screen on the wall, but the event itself became background noise when candidates arrived in the press room.

At one point, when Biden was making a statement to reporters about his son, Hunter, the livestream was muted. Reporters couldn’t hear what Harris was saying on stage, and she never came back to the press room to answer questions.

Earlier in the day, members of the public, including a couple who said they were from West Des Moines and wanted to see Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, were turned away from the forum. The Des Moines Register had the event listed as open to the public, but it was an invite-only event for UFCW members.

Just a couple UFCW members were brought into the media room to be interviewed about labor issues throughout the three-hour event.

Kathy Schwedler, a registered nurse from MercyOne in Sioux City was one of those members.

She said she was listening to hear if candidates spoke about patient-to-nurse ratios.

“That wasn’t quite hit upon, but I was blessed to be able to meet with a couple candidates and share my concerns with them and they were open to that and seem supportive,” Schwedler said.

With distractions aplenty, a few of the candidates tried to make the case it’s necessary for the Democrats to win back the 9 million people — including union members — who voted for President Barack Obama twice and Donald Trump once.

“We’ve got a big decision to make in this race, which is, do we want to spend the next ten years fighting a losing battle for Medicare for All, losing purple states all over this country?” Bennet asked. “Or do we want to turn our attention to an economic agenda that will actually give the people in the next room the chance to earn enough money to buy housing, buy health care, buy higher education and early childhood education? … When I talk to those folks in my own state, or in Iowa for that matter, and ask why did you vote for Donald Trump, they say we wanted to blow the place up.”

Health care and the economy weren’t the type of issues reporters heard about at the UFCW event, however.

Instead, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg spent two minutes answering one journalist’s question about how the United States should respond to growing Turkish aggression in areas U.S. troops are still located.

Reporters hit Bullock, a former labor-side union lawyer, with four questions in a row about Turkey and Syria.

“Will you send American troops to help Kurdish forces?” one reporter asked.

“I would not have pulled out the troops from protecting the Kurds,” Bullock answered.

“So what do you do to rectify the situation?” another reporter pressed.

“You get a new president, first of all,” Bullock said. “We’ve seen time and time again a reflexive foreign policy. That is not the way to lead this country.”

“But what steps would you take?” a third reporter asked.

“My suggestion is, by the time a year from now, who knows what happens to those 10,000 ISIS people,” Bullock said. “Who knows what’s happened at that time?”

“What would you do right now?” Bullock was then asked.

“Right now, I wouldn’t have pulled the U.S. troops. I wouldn’t have done that,” Bullock replied.

The next question in the series was about whether it was fair to criticize Biden for his son’s business dealings in foreign countries.

“I’m not even going to play that game,” Bullock said. “That’s exactly what Donald Trump wants.”

By Paige Godden
Posted 10/15/19