WSJSen. Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign.
But John Coli, vice president for the Teamsters central region, who brokered the Teamsters endorsement, said Sen. Obama was "pretty definitive that the time had come to start the beginning of the end" of the three-member independent review board that investigates suspect activity in the union. Mr. Coli said that Sen. Obama conveyed that view in a series of phone conversations and meetings with Teamsters officials last year.
Officials at the Teamsters oversight board share Sen. Obama's assessment that mob influence has dramatically fallen. But they say the union would have trouble continuing the anticorruption effort without the board. "When we have a case involving a member of organized crime and we send that to the union, the union automatically sends that back to us because they can't handle it," said John Cronin, who has been the administrator for the review board since it was created.
As the nation's fourth-largest labor union, the Teamsters are a powerful political force. Since 1990, the Teamsters' political action committee has spent $25 million on political elections. That puts them No. 12 on the list of top campaign spenders in recent years, $4 million shy of investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Michelle Malkin has details...
