Bonior predicts rank and file will choose Obama in November

But says that victory in Michigan hinges on Macomb, Oakland and Kent counties

David Bonior, former U.S. congressman from Michigan and former John Edwards campaign manager, says Sen. Barack Obama will win support in Michigan from organized labor but a harder challenge will be nonunion workers.

Bonior addressed the media for the first time since endorsing Obama in early April, back when the nomination was still being contested with Hillary Clinton. Bonior addressed the media via conference call from Washington, D.C.

A longtime champion of labor and co-founder of American Rights at Work, Bonior spoke about Obama’s pro-labor platforms, as well to Obama’s perceived difficulty with “white working-class voters,” as perpetuated by cable news networks.

Bonior says the three issues closest to workers this election are NAFTA, universal health care and the Employee Free Choice Act – legislation aimed at ensuring that employers could not fire or otherwise intimidate employees who attempt to organize unions. The measure, currently in limbo, passed the House and the Senate last year – but not by enough of a majority to survive a GOP filibuster.

Obama is for universal health care, the EFCA and for renegotiating NAFTA, while McCain is against all three.

Continued -“This economy is working for CEOs, but not for workers, because they don’t have the opportunity to form unions,” Bonior said. “Workers have continued to bear the brunt of bad policies over the past eight years and,” he said speaking of the stalled EFCA, “a failure to elect a pro-worker majority this year will mean that problems for working people will continue to grow.”

Bonior went on to note that the United States is in the bottom 20 percent of members in the United Nations in terms of the number of workers who belong to unions: “Right down there with Iran and Afghanistan.” Twelve percent of workers in the U.S. belong to a union, down from 35 percent union density in its peak in the booming 1950s.

Bonior, himself a former House minority whip and political strategist, describes himself as a volunteer for the Obama campaign. “They ask me to do things. I represent them at events. They ask for my advice – I want to be helpful. I’ll help anybody who cares about working people. I’ve helped out Pennsylvania Sen. [Arlen] Specter too, a Republican who is sometimes helpful to workers.”

In Michigan, Bonior said Obama needs to campaign hard in Macomb and Oakland counties, “and Grand Rapids’ Kent County,” he added, “where Obama had nearly 15,000 show up for a rally. Rallies, town halls like the one he did in Warren recently, all kinds of events he needs to have in Michigan, and he will,” said Bonior.

He predicted that Obama will win organized labor in Michigan, but that the larger challenge is nonunion working-class voters, which are, since the mid-’60s, a challenging demographic for Democrats across the country.

Bonior noted that Al Gore in 2000 won only one of the 22 union-unfriendly “right to work” states and that John Kerry lost all of them in 2004. But each won the union vote that did exist in each of those states. Unions, Bonior explained, have town hall meetings and other means by which they educate their members on how policy affects their daily lives. “And 71 percent of them vote progressively,” he noted.

But as fewer and fewer white working-class men can join unions each year, the more it has helped Republicans. As for white working-class voters, Bonior says that Obama won a majority of that vote against Hillary Clinton in states like Oregon, North Carolina and Virginia, but that “he needs to do better.” Bonior explained that his perceived problem with that segment is not an Obama problem, but a longtime Democrat problem.

Obama is challenging that “challenge” by campaigning in all 50 states, and not just in blue states and swing states, as Gore and Kerry did before him.

One of those “right to work” states, Iowa, already has Obama leading in the polls there. If he wins that state, he will be doing as well as Gore did in 2000 — an election many believe he won.