Didn’t the AFL-CIO spend hundreds of millions to help re-elect Obama?

Via Milwaukee Express:

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, recently spoke with The National Memo about the sequester’s automatic budget cuts, the danger of cuts to Social Security, the Keystone XL pipeline, immigration reform, President Obama and how to defend labor in an era of attacks on the right to organize. […]

This year, he’s naming committees to create a new convention agenda now—and they will include not only labor leaders but “our progressive partners, our allies” from the environmental movement, the civil rights and women’s movements, academia, as well as rank-and-file workers.

With those allies, the AFL-CIO toiled passionately to re-elect President Obama. Trumka is gratified that the president is pushing hard for immigration reform and appreciated the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which he calls “exciting because we got something done.”

Yet “every time [Obama] talks about the deficit instead of job creation, we find that disappointing. We think it’s a strategic mistake because the country doesn’t have a short-term deficit problem; it has a short-term jobs crisis that needs to be fixed. Every time he talks about chained CPI that’s a very, very big disappointment because it’s the wrong [policy] at the wrong time.”

So on Obama, “the jury is still out,” Trumka concludes. “We’re going to push him for four years and hopefully he will live up to the ideals that he has espoused to us on numerous occasions—and that I quite frankly believe that he believes.

“So we’ve got to make them a reality. And some of that is up to us. And if we don’t—if we expect them to just magically appear from this president or any other president—we will be disappointed.”