Public sector unions have depended on the Democratic machine to write the laws, to hand out the pensions and benefits, and retain their power to collect dues without respect or regard for the rights of the individual to his pay.
President Obama, however, remains a politician attempting to reign in the disparate coalition of ideologies which has defined the Democratic party for the last fifty plus years.
From feminists to the "gay lobby", for environmentalists to the union brigades, the commitment to more government, more spending, higher taxes has kept these diverse and even conflicting groups in live.
Now that environmentalists are sparring over protecting the environment vs. energy dependence, now that private and public sector unions are fighting for fewer jobs while pushing away, the coalition that held the Democratic machine together is falling apart.
When Governor Scott Walker won the recall in June, President Obama sent a tweet in support of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who lost by a larger margin to Walker than he had won on in 2010.
Obama could smell the blood in the water — the taxpayers are tired of paying for the retirement of the public sector while the private sector continues to suffer. In the state of California, reform Democrats are also stepping up and challenging the liberal establishment which has walked in lock-step with the public sector unions. Teachers' associations have placed the pensions and benefits of their compulsory members ahead of the benefit of the students, the teachers, and the communities which are supposed to be serving our schools.
The unions and the Democrats have become estranged bedfellows because of the strain of public sector benefits on the taxpayer. Even the choice to hold the Democratic convention in Right-to-Work North Carolina indicates that the tide is turning in both parties against union thuggery.
Union power has held its own convention apart from the Democratic convention this year. For collective power to collectively recuse itself from either major party signals without fail that the hey-days of salad pay is over.