www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-galesburg_obama_webfeb01,1,6024020.story
By Bob Secter
Tribune reporter
12:47 PM CST, February 2, 2008
GALESBURG, Ill.
Maytag workers whose jobs were shipped to Mexico serve as consistent
characters in Barack Obama's stump speech. He employs their stories in
railing against corporations that use trade pacts to replace well-paid union
workers with low-cost foreign ones.
It is a ready applause line for the Illinois presidential hopeful, one that
he has been reciting almost verbatim since he was a candidate for U.S.
Senate in 2004, when appliance giant Maytag was in the process of shutting a
refrigerator plant here, putting 1,600 people out of work.
But the union that represented most of those Galesburg workers isn't
impressed with Obama's advocacy. It has endorsed his Democratic rival,
Hillary Clinton. Its leaders say they wish he had done more about their
members' plight.
What rankles some is what Obama didn't do even as he expressed solidarity
four years ago with workers mounting a desperate fight to save their jobs.
Obama had a special connection to Maytag: Lester Crown, one of the company's
directors and biggest investors whose family, records show, has raised tens
of thousands of dollars for Obama's campaigns since 2003. But Crown says
Obama never raised the fate of the Galesburg plant with him, and the
billionaire industrialist insists any jawboning would have been futile.
Obama's chief political strategist, David Axelrod, said late Thursday that
the senator did not know Crown sat on Maytag's board until the Tribune noted
it last September in a story about the closing of the Maytag headquarters in
Newton, Iowa.
As Illinois readies for its part in next week's Super Tuesday primaries, the
high-profile treatment given the Maytag situation by the state's homegrown
candidate is a reminder of the often awkward intersection of populist
rhetoric, complex issues and the financial realities of presidential
campaigning.
Obama's rhetoric on Maytag has been unswerving and underscored by the
closure of other U.S. appliance plants by Whirlpool Corp., which bought
Maytag in 2006.
In his victory speech after Saturday's South Carolina primary, Obama spoke
yet again of "the Maytag worker who is now competing with his own teenager
for a $7-an-hour job at Wal-Mart because the factory he gave his life to
shut its doors."
Beyond such talk, there is little evidence that Obama went to any lengths to
fight the Galesburg shutdown. Some analysts say his ties to the
Crowns--Lester's son, James, is the Illinois finance chairman of Obama's
presidential run--leave him open to criticism.
Charles Lewis, founder of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity,
said in the era of big money politics there's often a disconnect between the
passionate words of a politician and the financial interests of the wealthy
benefactors who help bankroll their campaigns.
"It is hypocritical," said Lewis. "Democrats are often in a tricky position
because they are close to labor and talk about the homeless and poor, but
they need money and have to turn to the captains of industry to get it."
The Obama campaign said the Maytag workers' union never asked him to
intervene with Crown and that he would have done so if they had. Union
officials said they were unaware of the Crowns' ties to Maytag or to Obama.
In his campaign, Obama has not shied from condemning rivals for straying
from their own populist images.
Locked in an increasingly personal war of words with Clinton, Obama has
attacked her for long-ago service on the board of Wal-Mart, which has frosty
relations with organized labor. Before John Edwards dropped out of the race
this week, Obama hit him for financial ties to a hedge fund with investments
in Whirlpool. The Obama critique stressed Whirlpool's role in closing U.S.
factories, including Maytag's longtime headquarters in Newton, Iowa.
Crown family members are major Democratic Party donors. Some have given to
Clinton's campaigns for the U.S. Senate in New York. But in the presidential
run, their money is behind Obama, campaign records show. The Crowns and
employees of their family-run holding company have given at least $195,000
to Obama's U.S. Senate and presidential campaigns.
Lester Crown made his first contribution to Obama, $2,100, last February and
hosted a fundraiser for him last fall. But Crown's wife has pumped $16,100
into Obama' coffers, beginning with a $12,000 gift to his U.S. Senate
campaign in 2003.The economic viability of Maytag's Galesburg operation is
still in dispute. Obama wrote extensively about the plant in his 2006 best
seller, "The Audacity of Hope," and clearly sided with frustrated union
workers who insisted their plant was profitable and productive but was being
sacrificed to corporate greed.
Maytag management announced plans in 2002 to shutter the Galesburg factory.
In an interview, Lester Crown said the plant hadn't been competitive for
years and that Maytag gave two years' notice of the shutdown to minimize the
pain. "Barack can say whatever he wants, but this was not an example of
corporate indifference. That's absolutely inaccurate," Crown said, though he
stressed that his support for Obama is still unwavering.
In a statement issued late Thursday, the Obama campaign defended his record
on standing up for American workers against special interests. "Because of
Obama's history of working with Democrats and Republicans to get things
done, our campaign has generated the support of voters and contributors with
a wide range of policy beliefs," the statement read.
Most of the Galesburg workers were members of the International Association
of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, whose national president has complained
loudly this campaign season that Obama's support for Maytag workers was more
show than substance.
IAM spokesman Rick Sloan, said the union's problems with Obama go beyond
Galesburg. Sloan complained that Obama has not used his position in the
Senate to help Illinois IAMAW members hurt in other plant shutdowns as well
as the United Airlines bankruptcy. Obama also spurned the union's
endorsement interview last summer, Sloan said.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn and former U.S. Rep. Lane Evans,
who represented Galesburg, aggressively lobbied Maytag to change its mind in
2004, Sloan said. Obama did not, Sloan said, adding: "He could easily have
said, Lester my friend, there are folks hurting in Galesburg, you're on the
board, what can you do?"Obama first took up the Maytag workers' cause in
mid-2004 as they mounted a futile effort to save the Galesburg plant. Obama
met with the workers and rallied with them there to fight the closing, but
did not broach the subject with Crown. "I have never had a conversation with
State Sen. Obama or U.S. Sen. Obama regarding the Maytag Corporation," Crown
told the Tribune.
Maytag shut the Galesburg plant after Labor Day 2004. At the time, Crown
owned nearly 4 percent of Maytag's common stock, according to company
filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Another 5 percent of
Maytag stock was owned by an investment group that included Crown's children
and relatives, the filings show.A year later, when the company announced its
sale to Whirlpool, the combined Maytag stakes of Crown and an investment
group including his children and relatives were worth around $150 million.
Supporters of Obama note that he was still serving in the Illinois Senate in
2004 and was only a candidate for the U.S. Senate with no power beyond the
bully pulpit to fight the closing. Since his election, he has backed
legislation to combat the overseas export of American jobs. In May 2006,
Obama wrote to the Secretary of Labor asking for assistance for displaced
Maytag workers.
There still is little awareness of Obama's ties to the Crowns in Galesburg,
a blue-collar town of 37,000 in western Illinois, and much admiration toward
him. "I like Obama," said Mary Ann Armstrong, who lost her job inspecting
refrigerator parts for defects when the plant closed. "He was new back then
and probably did all he could do."
The factory's shutdown was a blow to Galesburg, but the withering of its
manufacturing base began well before NAFTA's 1993 ratification. Galesburg
has endured a slow bleeding of factories and blue collar job since the
1970s.
Maytag's closing caused undeniable pain in Galesburg. The tax base is down,
as is school enrollment. But it wasn't cataclysmic. Obama has suggested
former Maytag workers have been forced to scrounge for minimum-wage pay.
Still, many have landed new factory jobs 45 minutes away in the Quad Cities
and Peoria.Perhaps the most lasting blow from Maytag's departure is to the
reputation of Galesburg, the birthplace of poet Carl Sandburg. At Dr. Mike's
computer repair shop on Main Street, owner Mike Kroll sees Obama's frequent
focus on Galesburg and Maytag as welcome but also counterproductive. "It
would be nice," he said, "to see Galesburg as the feature of some other
story than the death knell of manufacturing in Middle America."
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