On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Mark Rickling wrote:
> So all those Republicans and Independents have turned against unions
> because they didn't support single payer or support adding $100s of
> billions to the deficit in a real jobs bill? When I think of what's
> changed in the past couple years to precipitate such a drop
Although it isn't mentioned by Pew, I suspect one big thing that happened in the last two years was the Big 3 bailout/bankruptcy/clunker sale. I think that left a bad taste in all kinds of ways which, fairly or not, was associated mainly with unions. Among them
-- "too much" union clout (getting them money that no other non-banking industry got) (and who wants to be associated with the bankers?);
-- sucking money from taxpayers (it looks like the only part of Tarp that will be a dead loss, plus or minus AIG); and
-- (unfairly blamed on the unions) dramatic industrial sclerosis.
And that's not even counting the ways in which leftists despaired over the negotiations over controlling the companies in return for concessions.
Michael