Prospect.org

SEIU's new secretary-treasurer is a champion of immigrant rights and an innovator in the fight to unionize marginalized service-industry workers.

In the wake of the resignation last week of Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, Mary Kay Henry, the new president of the Service Employees International Union, sent a memo last Friday to members of SEIU's International Executive Board announcing that she intends to nominate Executive Vice President Eliseo Medina to Burger's former post, the second highest in the union, at SEIU's board meeting in Los Angeles next month. It is a certainty that the board will ratify Henry's choice.

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Growing up in Movieland

I grew up in Movieland -- Los Angeles' Westside in the 1950s and 1960s. I went to school with the kids of people in the industry, which was so hopelessly uncool, we didn't even talk about it. (The guy with whom I co-edited my high school literary magazine never mentioned that his father had created a well-known sitcom -- I Love Lucy . I found out when he wrote about it 30 years later.) A sclerotic studio system was churning out The Sound of Music while we were deciphering Dylan and watching Vietnam burn every night on the tube. When I showed up in New York to go to college, the last thing I expected to study, or love, was the movies.

But New York, circa 1968, had other ideas. There was, of course, no shortage of politics to entice me, but by the late '60s, New York also offered the closest thing to an overview of film history that anyone had yet assembled. There were a dozen or so theaters scattered across Manhattan where the Marx Brothers or Bogart or Jean Renoir were in seemingly constant rotation. In 1969, the Elgin Theater down in Chelsea presented the first retrospective of Buster Keaton's silent comedies, most of which hadn't been screened since they'd been dumped in assorted attics 40 years earlier.

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How to spend $80 million of your own money in the primary and render yourself unelectable in the process.

LOS ANGELES -- As California Republicans wind up a costly party primary election, they'd do well to remember how Arnold Schwarzenegger became the only Republican elected to a major statewide office since 1994.

It wasn't his celebrity. It wasn't his program. It wasn't his opponent (though Gray Davis was certainly an unpopular governor). It wasn't even his accent.

Schwarzenegger was elected governor in 2003 chiefly because he didn't have to enter a Republican primary. The contest in which he won the statehouse was that most unusual of electoral animals, a recall election, in which candidates of all parties, and voters of all parties, participated. Arnold never had to careen rightward to win a plurality of Republican voters in a Republican primary. The electoral recall process eliminates primaries altogether.

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Moribund Democrats showed surprising signs of life in yesterday's elections.

For a party presumably at death's door, the Democrats had themselves a pretty fair election yesterday, while liberal and labor Democrats had an altogether bang-up time.

The Democrats held John Murtha's southwest Pennsylvania House seat in exactly the kind of white working-class district that is supposed to be trending Republican this year. Voters ousted the exquisitely vulnerable Arlen Specter -- an avowedly careerist incumbent in an anti-incumbent year -- in favor of a far fresher face, Joe Sestak, who also has a better chance than Specter come November.

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Having waged a successful underdog campaign, Mary Kay Henry steps up to lead SEIU -- and mend some fences in the process.

When Mary Kay Henry graduated from Michigan State in 1979 with a degree in industrial labor relations, it took her the better part of a year to land a job with a union, chiefly because most unions in those days hired few if any women. During that time, she worked as a clerical employee in a hotel and as a night janitor. She hit bottom, she told me during an interview on Monday, when she took on a second job as a grill cook, and, in her sleep-deprived state, "fell asleep inside a freezer."

All of which, some might argue, was merely suitable preparation for a career inside the Service Employees International Union, a famously demanding employer. Hired as a researcher by SEIU, she built a reputation as a crack organizer who became the union's organizing director and then head of its health-care division during the presidency of Andy Stern. On Saturday, having waged a successful underdog campaign against Secretary Treasurer Anna Burger to succeed Stern, Henry was elected SEIU's new president.

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Why America needs -- but probably won't get -- a 2010 version of the Depression-era public jobs programs.

In the autumn of 1933, Harry Hopkins was worried about the coming winter. Since May, he had served in Franklin Roosevelt's administration as head of the federal government's new -- in fact, its first -- program to distribute funds to the unemployed. Neither unemployment insurance nor food stamps nor welfare had yet come into existence. Only a handful of states had relief programs, and they were rapidly going broke. And private charity was almost laughably inadequate to the problems of a nation where unemployment stood close to 25 percent.

Hopkins feared that millions of Americans would be without food or shelter in the coming cold months. In October, he met with the president and proposed something new: a temporary federal jobs program to see the nation through the winter. It would employ 4 million people and last for four months. Roosevelt did a quick calculation, figured it would cost $400 million, and decided to take that money from the budget of the Public Works Administration, run by his secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes.

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