Unholy Union: Why is the SEIU boss the White House’s most frequent visitor? »

The Friday before Halloween, in response to requests from the public, the White House released records of the visitors it had received between January and July. George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, and Serena Williams were among the famous names on the list. But the man who appeared most frequently is less well-known. His name is Andrew Stern, and during the first six months of Obama’s tenure, he visited the White House 21 times — about three times per month. Most of these visits included an intimate meeting with the president or other senior officials. Among outsiders, Stern enjoys unrivaled access to the White House. And the more you know about him, the spookier that sounds.

Stern is president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a federation of health-care, public-sector, and custodial workers that claims approximately 2 million members. Stern replaced former president John Sweeney in 1996, the year after Sweeney won a bitterly fought battle for control of the AFL-CIO. At the time, Sweeney’s win was viewed as a victory for the left wing of the labor movement. Ramesh Ponnuru wrote in these pages: “Many of the people in [Sweeney’s] camp have backgrounds in the New Left.” Andrew Stern certainly fits that description.

Stern lacks the traditional blue-collar pedigree of a union boss. In a profile of him for The New Republic, Bradford Plumer wrote, “Stern was part of a generation of idealistic union leaders who came to organized labor from college, not the factory floor.” He started at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school in the late ’60s, dabbled in student radicalism, changed his major, bummed around Europe, came back to the States, and went to work as a welfare case officer in Pennsylvania. SEIU had just organized his shop, and he got active in the union. He ended up as one of Sweeney’s protégés, his successor, and, eventually, his bête noire.

On the intimidation front, SEIU has worked with the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The group once served as a valuable ally, but its reputation now lies in tatters thanks to a pair of amateur journalists who, costumed as pimp and hooker, filmed themselves obtaining advice from ACORN staffers on how best to shelter the proceeds of a child-prostitution ring from taxation.

SEIU did not sustain much damage from the scandal, even though, as a colleague of mine quipped, ACORN often acts as its paramilitary wing. SEIU’s former political director, Patrick Gaspard, remains comfortably ensconced at the White House as political director — Obama’s Karl Rove — and the connection does not appear to have hurt him.

SEIU’s corporate campaigns, however effective, are nothing new. Stern’s real breakthrough came when he realized that labor could offer a carrot as well as a stick Around 50 percent of SEIU’s members work in the health-care industry as nurses, hospital attendants, and lab techs. The facilities that employ such workers benefit from a number of government programs. SEIU’s pitch was simple: Let us organize your workforce, and we’ll use our lobbying power to push for increased government spending on health care.

In pursuit of his vision, Stern has turned the SEIU into a massive grassroots army that can mobilize in behalf of candidates and legislation. The scope of its activities in 2008 was epic. Stern bragged that “we spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama — $60.7 million, to be exact — and we’re proud of it.”

SEIU has set aside $85 million to spend over the next two years on political advocacy. The union started the year with three major objectives: a union-friendly stimulus, a union-friendly health-care bill, and a bill that would make it easier to organize workers into unions. It has brought its influence to bear on all three of these debates, with varying degrees of success.

This is good for unions, but it’s even better for liberals. The past three decades have seen unions embrace left-wing positions on everything from affirmative action to gay marriage to the war in Iraq. (Times have changed: Former AFL-CIO president George Meany refused to support George McGovern because McGovern opposed the war in Vietnam.) The bigger unions grow, the more power they have, as Andrew Stern will tell anyone who will listen. Stern’s obsession with size has embroiled the labor movement in some of the nastiest fights it has ever seen. Old-school union guys like Sal Roselli, a former Stern lieutenant whose National Union of Healthcare Workers split from SEIU earlier this year in a bitter divorce, told Bradford Plumer that “Stern’s drive for growth at all costs” had caused him to ignore what was in the best interest of his members. But Andrew Stern was a liberal before he was a union organizer, just as Obama was a liberal before he was a community organizer. Unions may have existed to serve workers’ interests at one time. These days, they exist to serve liberalism.

“The most important thing to note about what SEIU is doing is that it’s really become a lobbying arm for the president,” Berg says. “Much like Organizing for America [the community-organizing group run by the Democratic National Committee], they are trying to drive bodies nationwide to lobby their congressmen and senators to try to implement the president’s agenda.” Seen in that light, it is entirely unsurprising that Stern’s name should be the one that appears most frequently in White House visitor logs. Obama and Stern are working together to make America a more liberal place, and they want you to join them.

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