There is an old story that an argument broke out on the Senate floor in the 1950s between the renowned but politically maladroit Sens. Paul Douglas and Joseph Clark. “Uh, oh,” said Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who had a liberal voting record but also a sharp wit, “trouble in the leper colony.”
Something like that seems to have happened in Nevada, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The Nevada Education Association, a teachers’ union, put an issue on the ballot to raise the “business tax” 2 percent. But the Nevada AFL-CIO has voted to oppose the initiative. The executive director of the state AFL-CIO explained the union representatives’ reasoning: “The vote today in opposition to the margins tax initiative is not a vote against education,” he said. “It is a vote against a flawed initiative that will cost many of our members their jobs and raise the cost of living on Nevadans on a fixed income and on citizens that are still struggling to make ends meet after years of a terrible recession.” In other words, the more you tax private sector businesses, the fewer jobs they produce. Sounds sort of like Jack Kemp-style supply economics.
No, I’m not saying that either the teachers union or the Nevada AFL-CIO are political lepers, any more than McCarthy was saying Douglas and Clark were (or was he? anyway, they were highly intelligent and dedicated men). The larger point is that the Democratic party is a coalition of disparate groups with different interests, and it’s hard to hold it together. Here we see the private sector unionists perceiving that they have interests opposed to the public sector unionists. When the Democrats’ disparate coalition holds together, it’s a majority of the nation. When it doesn’t — well, it’s something of a mess.
