The American Spectator

p> AFSCME HOW I FEEL br> In the hours leading up to last Thursday’s rumored announcement that the influential Service Employees International Union were backing former Vermont Gov. Howie Dean , his opponents Sen. John Kerry , Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sen. John Edwards made desperate attempts to stall the announcement. /p>

Kerry and his senior advisers, in particular, were furiously calling SEIU president Andrew Stern. Their anger and sense of futility built when rumor started to spread mid-day that not only had Dean been tabbed by the SEIU, but also that the Gerald McEntee’s American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees seemed destined to endorse the diminutive one from Vermont.

“Kerry was apoplectic,” says one of his campaign staffers. “He just went nuts. We are just devastated. We knew SEIU was probably lost after the summer conference where Dean and Edwards came out ahead in straw poll voting of membership. But AFSCME was supposed to be in the bag. We thought once McEntee got over Clark, he was back to us. This hurts.”

Kerry spent much of Wednesday and Thursday on the campaign trail attacking Dean for his remarks about wanting to be the candidate of voters with the Confederate flag on their trucks. Kerry’s remarks were tailored almost exclusively to minority voters, and even more narrowly to the large SEIU and AFSCME membership in New Hampshire and elsewhere. SEIU has one of the largest — if not the largest — minority membership in organized labor.