April 04, 2011 10:41 PM UTC

Remember This Day When the 2012 Election Heats Up

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• by: Colorado Pols

Massive civil rights rallies have been planned for today across the country (Denver’s rally is at 5:30 at City Park) to coincide with the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As The New York Times reports:

Labor unions and civil rights groups, joined by many other liberal organizations, are holding hundreds of rallies and teach-ins nationwide on Monday to defend collective bargaining and to tie it to the cause that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was fighting for in the days before his death exactly 43 years ago. The sponsors of the “We Are One” rallies being held in 50 states repeatedly note that when Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, he was planning to march with 1,300 striking sanitation workers.

“In some ways the challenges we face on April 4, 2011, are very similar to those Dr. King faced in 1968,” Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Monday in a telephone news conference. “We’re suffering from grave economic challenges here at home.”

The rallies and 175 teach-ins have been organized in large part to protest the Republican-led efforts in Wisconsin and Ohio to curb collective bargaining for public employees. In some ways, the day of rallies aim to build on the union protests in those two states and to warn labor’s adversaries in state capitals and Washington that unions remain a force to contend with in politics and that unions have many supporters.

Organizers of the rallies also said they wanted to draw attention to federal and state budget cuts that they said were hurting the most vulnerable Americans.

When the 2012 elections heat up next summer, we may be looking back at this day as a tipping point in gains by Democrats at the ballot box. The over-reaching and completely unnecessary moves by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans around the country awakened a slumbering group of progressives that might not otherwise have been as enthused about 2012. Walker’s efforts to take away collective bargaining rights prompted unprecedented demonstrations locally and created a firestorm that swept across the country.

If this sounds familiar, it should…but with a major caveat. It was early in 2009 when the “Tea Party” first began to emerge, and of course, they went on to play a significant role in the 2010 elections. The Tea Party’s emergence was somewhat related to Democratic efforts to reform health care, but by no means was their anger singularly focused in any one direction. The Tea Party and their supporters were angry about a lot of things, but mostly they were just…angry. They were a mob, being financed by outside efforts, looking for a direction in which to march. You can argue that the Tea Party was formed because of legitimate gripes with government, but you’d by lying if you didn’t say that their efforts were largely uninformed (“Keep Government Out of My Medicare” being just one famous example of this).

In contrast, the rallies scheduled for today have a very clear civil rights focus after Gov. Walker’s attempts at union busting in Wisconsin. This is certainly a progressive cause, but we’re talking about people’s livelihoods here. This isn’t just a symbolic opposition to a general set of beliefs — this is a very real opposition to a very real, and very specific, attack. Why Republicans decided to pick this fight is a mystery to us, but perhaps they just misinterpreted seeing a larger mandate in the 2010 elections — a mandate that quite clearly did not exist, as poll after poll shows most Americans oppose what happened in Wisconsin.

But back to the point at hand: We’ve got a feeling that tonight’s rallies will be looked back upon as another major turning point in American elections. While moderate Republicans fret over angering the Tea Party, an otherwise bored and somewhat disillusioned progressive left suddenly has solidified around a common cause. If that energy continues into 2012 (and if Republicans continue their overreaching attacks), the electoral momentum will undoubtedly rest with Democrats.

April 4, 2011. Remember it. Come November 6, 2012, many politicians may never forget.