I’m told old friends, Joe Biden and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, had a good private meeting yesterday, one of many meetings the vice president and senior administration officials have been having and will have with top labor leaders. (If the labor movement wasn’t so atomized they might have all gone in together.) “No real news coming out of the meeting,” one person with knowledge of the session said. “It was more of a general, and ongoing discussion. They discussed a whole variety of things,” and part of a continuing and ongoing dialogue” between Labor and the Obama White House.
Among the topics discussed were the Employee Free Choice Act, which the administration has assured labor leaders it still wants to push for in late Spring, and the nomination of Hilda Solis to be Labor Secretary. Republicans seem to be softening in their opposition to Solis but it now looks like there won’t be a committee vote on her nomination until after Congressional recess, February 23rd, making it likely to be the last cabinet seat to be filled.
On another front, TPM Alumnus Greg Sargent now of whorunsgov.com quotes David Axelrod downplaying the New York Times reported rift between him and Tim Geithner, something he downplayed in the Times story itself.
My nugget to add to this is that no one on the economic team, so far as I can tell, was pushing for the kind of showy, punitive measures that might have made today’s ugly roll out of the new bailout plan at least more appealing to those who want to see banks punished. It echoes what I said last week about Summers and Geithner. People who expected to see fireworks between those two are ignoring their decades of friendship and how ideologically sympatico they are. Future fireworks, if there are any in the land of no drama, are likely to come between the economic team and otherson the periphery. In any event, the bailout plan such as it is, is now out there. It was a half-built house when it was unveiled this morning and given the market reaction today to the thing it’s probably going to get revamped even more.
