RUTHFULLY YOURS

By SETH LIPSKY

What she tells them is they can “join millions of other union members in a commonsense movement” to help fight “for budgets that share the burden in a truly fair way and for commonsense reforms that take power away from vested interests like union bosses and big business lobby groups, and put it back where it belongs—with ‘We the People.'”

In June of 2009, I took to a stage at the New York Public Library to interview the journalist Sam Tanenhaus about his new book, “The Death of Conservatism.” Conservatism’s rise from the grave was still a few months into the future. At one point Sam remarked on what a remarkable figure President Ronald Reagan was, although, he noted, “for appeasing the Soviet Union” Reagan had come under “strident denunciations”—”from the right.”

“I wrote some of those,” I interjected. When the laughter died down, I recalled a column I’d written on this page in 1984 about Lane Kirkland. I’d interviewed the president of the AFL-CIO in Brussels, where he was protesting Reagan’s decision to welcome communist Poland into the International Monetary Fund, even while the regime’s truncheons were being used against the unionists of Solidarity at Gdansk. When The Wall Street Journal came at Reagan from the right, I noted, it was arm in arm with Big Labor.

I’ve been thinking about that moment as the confrontation grows between the taxpayers and the public employees unions. There was a time when unions played a less nihilistic role in our national life. In the defining struggle of the 20th century, its leadership chose our democratic capitalism as a better system for working men and women than communism.

Kirkland was no fan of Reagan, and if he were alive today there is no doubt he would be marching against any effort to water down the right to bargain collectively. Even George Meany, though he has been widely quoted as saying it is impossible to negotiate collectively with the government, stood with the unions when they tried. But both could work across the ideological divide and were respected even by their adversaries among Republicans.

Reagan had, after all, himself been the president of a labor union, the Screen Actors Guild, which he led at a time when it was a target of communist penetration. It was as a union leader that he honed the savvy with which he later took on the Soviet Union and also gained the vision for the Big Tent Republicanism that gave him such political reach.

Reagan’s first major speech overseas, to the British Parliament, led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, one of whose partners is the American Center for International Labor Solidarity. And when Kirkland was dying, it was the Endowment that brought together Lech Walesa and Henry Kissinger to give him the honors he was due.

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Kirkland’s leadership of the AFL-CIO had been ended in 1995 by the rise of public-employee unions that today make up the biggest part of a shrinking unionized work force. At a convention in the Hotel Hilton in Manhattan, Kirkland’s chosen successor was defeated and John Sweeney was elected president of the federation.

Mr. Sweeney’s Service Employees International Union had merged with the National Association of Government Employees, and in his campaign to topple Kirkland he’d been backed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Standing in the hall at the time, I thought labor was now in for a vast fight against the taxpayers.

So which Republican is reaching out to union labor today in the way that Reagan did? It turns out to be another union veteran, named—wait for it—Sarah Palin. Almost the first thing she said in 2008 when she was introduced by Sen. John McCain as his running mate was that she was married to a proud member of the United Steelworkers. She herself was, when she worked at a local power utility and telephone company, a card-carrying sister in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Mrs. Palin has been using Facebook to reach out to the rank and file. A few months ago she so enraged AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka that he travelled to Alaska to give a speech attacking her. Mrs. Palin responded with a Facebook posting headlined “Union Brothers and Sisters, Join Our Commonsense Cause.” It was not she, Mrs. Palin wrote, whose policies were causing such high unemployment—”that would be the man in the large white house on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

The feud generated so much Internet traffic that a columnist at the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne, complained that Mr. Trumka couldn’t get any attention with his usual speeches. “Maybe,” he suggested, “if Trumka turns himself into one of Palin’s leading public adversaries, his substantive comments will start getting attention.”

Mrs. Palin has lately been upping the ante, arguing that labor leadership has lost touch and is serving “not union members, not union families, and certainly not the larger community.” She’s been using labor lingo to make a conservative case. She writes that her message to “good union brothers and sisters is that you have another option.”

What she tells them is they can “join millions of other union members in a commonsense movement” to help fight “for budgets that share the burden in a truly fair way and for commonsense reforms that take power away from vested interests like union bosses and big business lobby groups, and put it back where it belongs—with ‘We the People.'”

No doubt Mrs. Palin will be laughed at by the union leadership. And not even she suggests she yet has the depth of experience or tough hide of Ronald Reagan. But like Reagan she has a union card in her background. She also seems to appreciate what Reagan found out, that on some issues Big Labor was to his right, after all.

Mr. Lipsky edits the New York Sun at www.nysun.com.