Brian, one of the better-paid critics at Paid Critics, has a typically combative post on the Working Families for Wal-Mart poll I briefly alluded to yesterday:

The Austin American-Statesman offers the latest evidence that the union leaders’ attempts to turn Wal-Mart into a political issue have failed miserably. Long after the hot air from the union leader-contrived bus tour has mercifully dissipated, “in this final week of 2006 campaigning, the Wal-Mart issue has not figured prominently in debates or candidate ads.”

Brian then cites said poll “that shows most voters are not interested in Wal-Mart as a political issue.” Next, he notes, “Most glaringly, only one percent of union households believe Wal-Mart is the top political issue [Emphasis in original].”

I hate to break it to you Brian, but I don’t even believe that Wal-Mart is the top political issue of the upcoming election. Do you know that there is a war going on in Iraq and it’s not going very well? By my count, Wal-Mart is a symbol of either issue number three or four, growing economic inequality in the United States (and the shoddy treatment of American workers by large corporations in particular). What about the Wal-Mart issue on its own? There is no Wal-Mart issue on its own. That’s why the premise of Brian’s post (not to mention the poll it’s based upon) is incredibly misguided.

Towards the bottom, Brian mocks Wake-Up Wal-Mart for repeatedly saying that they were going to make Wal-Mart a political issue, claiming this poll proves that they’ve failed. Brian misses a very important distinction here. Wake-Up Wal-Mart wants to make Wal-Mart a political issue, but they never said that they were going to make Wal-Mart the most important political issue in the entire country. While Brian claims that Wake-Up Wal-Mart has failed in its stated goal, the enormous number of pixels the little men and women behind the curtain at Working Families for Wal-Mart have spilled trying to convince Democrats not to make Wal-Mart a political issue tells me that they’ve struck a nerve.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 0859 by Jonathan Rees and is filed under National, Paid Critics, Politics, Working Families For Walmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.