Opinion: Picket lines as political currency

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It’s becoming really quite the thing among Democratic candidates to brag about or promise to picket somewhere.

Hillary Clinton is the latest to join the ranks, reportedly promising the culinary workers in Las Vegas she’d join the line if they strike. Barack Obama and John Edwards have already said the same thing. Do you think that would get on the TV news, three Democratic presidential candidates walking the lines on the Strip?

And the other night in Chicago, before thousands of union members in Soldier Field, the candidates were standing in line to talk about picketing. There’ll be no Sister Souljah moment in that area.

‘In the last two years,’ Edwards intoned, ‘I have walked 200 picket lines. I have helped organize thousands of workers with 23 national unions.’

‘I’ve worked with you,’ Obama added, ‘and marched on your picket lines. Everybody in this stadium knows the work I’ve done with Illinois labor, and that’s what I want to do all across the country.’

But Joe Biden of Delaware was not to be out-picketed. And he’d had enough of his former Senate colleague from North Carolina.

‘For 34 years I’ve walked with you in picket lines,’ he told the crowd. ‘Twenty-five years ago with Rev. Jackson he and I walked picket lines together.... It’s not where you’ve been the last two years. Where were you the six years you were in the Senate? How many picket lines did you walk on? .... The question is, did you walk when it cost? Did you walk when you were from a state that is not a labor state? Did you walk when the corporations in your state were opposed to you? That’s the measure of whether we’ll be with you when it’s tough.’

We suspect that was not the last we’ll be hearing of picket lines this year.

--Andrew Malcolm