What you didn't see at the AFSCME
Posted: Tuesday, June 19, 2007 1:17 PM by Hardball
(From Brooke Brower, Hardball producer)
Today’s AFSCME presidential forum was a change of pace compared to our last presidential event (MSNBC’s GOP debate at the Reagan Library ). A pumped up crowd came running down the aisles (literally “Price is Right” style) when they opened the ballroom doors and blasted “Shake a Tail Feather” by Ray Charles . The vast majority of the thousands of AFSCME members there wore t-shirts (like these), which made for a sea of green looking out from the stage. They may have been dressed in green, but they were true blue when they booed mentions of bold faced red names like Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The first two candidates, Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), got the crowd fired up even more with explicit labor-friendly pledges. Richardson said he’d appoint a union leader as labor secretary and Kucinich said he’d cancel NAFTA and the WTO. It’s debatable as to whether Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC), or Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) (the top three candidates according to our newest NBC/WSJ poll) landed the loudest welcome from the audience. Event officials told us that a large piece of the crowd was made up of AFSCME members from New York, but that didn’t mean all the applause and flashbulbs were for Clinton alone. Edwards and Obama both received raucous ovations when they hit the stage.
One sidebar: there was a noticeable difference between the security presence for Clinton and Obama. During Clinton’s time, we saw one or two Secret Service members on each side of the stage. During Obama’s time, there were several people from the security team both in front of the stage and next to it.
