If it wasn’t already strange enough to have professed free-market conservatives attacking a candidate for his free-market success, the GOP presidential primary just got even weirder.
The big labor union that represents government workers is spending $1 million on a television ad in Florida to attack Mitt Romney’s record as a businessman. It's an ad clearly designed to aid Newt Gingrich, but AFSCME, the Association of Federal, State, County, and Municipal Employees, is no friend of the GOP.
As the Miami Herald points out, that million dollars is much bigger than Newt's ad buy for the Florida primary, which comes to a grand total of zero dollars.
AFSCME spent $67 million to elect Barack Obama in 2008 and they have every intention of doing everything in their power to elect Obama again. After all, this is likely the most Big Labor friendly President in American history.
As John Nichols explains in a new article celebrating the AFSCME strategy in The Nation, the mouthpiece of the radical left, Big Labor isn’t trying to help any Republican; just the opposite. The union is picking up on the attack against Romney first used by Newt Gingrich and former candidate Rick Perry. This is an investment designed to get the GOP to nominate what Big Labor believes will be a weaker candidate.
Nichols writes that it isn’t “any secret that AFSCME is looking to weaken Romney.” The Democrats “would much prefer to see Republicans field another candidate, such as the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, against Mr. Obama in the general election,” says the Washington Times.
It a safe bet that the devious AFSCME plot is being applauded at the White House, too. As far back as August, the Obama campaign made it clear that they saw Romney as the toughest competition for Obama.
We “have to kill Romney,” confessed one of the White House strategists to Politico.com.
Obama has done everything Big Labor asked for the last three years, and it looks like Big Labor is returning the favor.