Union Drops New Mailer In Battlegrounds Hammering McCain On Health Care
By Greg Sargent - September 30, 2008, 10:10AM
The AFL-CIO -- which has taken on a lead role in trying to persuade working class voters in swing states to vote their economic interests -- keeps up the economic assault on John McCain with this new mailer in battleground states hammering McCain as rich, out of touch, and a disaster on health care.
The mail, which will be dropped in Colorado, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, features Ohio union worker Dave Fecke hammering McCain as "rich" and saying "he doesn't get it" on kitchen-table issues.
The mail piece, which doesn't mention Obama, signals the start of a new and aggressive campaign by the union to target McCain in those key battlegrounds by speaking to worker anxieties about health care with more mailers, phone calls, and door-to-door canvassing, AFL-CIO spokesperson Steve Smith says. Health care, of course, is an increasingly urgent issue on its own for financially pinched families, as well as a kind of proxy for larger anxieties about the state of the economy in general -- anxieties that McCain has failed to address, polls show.
"McCain's practically had free health care his whole life," Fecke says in the mail piece. "He doesn't understand how hard it would be for my family to pay more."
The stakes of such efforts are particularly high in the slower-growing states of the industrial midwest, where polls show Obama gaining but still not at the point where he's put these states way, despite the economic collapse.
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