Editor's Note: Here we talk with John Wojcik, labor editor for the People's World.

PA: Thus far in the campaign for the Presidential nomination, the media has, as usual, been focusing on the personalities of the various candidates, their hairstyles and their “experience” or lack of it, and of course any bickering they can foment between the candidates. Then there are all the usual campaign slogans about the need for a “change in business-as-usual in Washington.” Could you help us refocus on the voters themselves and the issues they care about, based on your first-hand reporting of the events in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the people you have talked to?

JW: I’ve given a lot of thought to this. When I went to Iowa last week, a couple of things really struck me. The first event I went to was an Obama rally the night before the caucuses. It was held at Hoover High School, which is in a predominantly white working-class neighborhood in northwest Des Moines.

It was about 3 degrees below zero outside and it was 10 o’clock at night, pretty late for a rally. There was a lot of snow and ice on the ground, and you had to trudge through it to get to the school. So it was kind of a shock to see nearly 1,500 people gathered in the auditorium for that campaign rally.

It was a predominantly white audience, 96 percent or more, and they had come out in zero weather to attend a campaign rally for an African American candidate for President. Right away I said, “Boy, something is happening here!” It was especially interesting, because every second person I interviewed was a registered independent. I’m not saying that they were undecided, because obviously they were there at an Obama rally. I’m distinguishing here between independents and undecideds.

But what really hit me was that if these numbers are any indication – if such a large number of political independents are showing up at a Democratic Party campaign event – that has to be an ominous sign for the Republicans and the right wing. In the 2006 Congressional elections, a majority of independents, a comfortable majority in most places, came out and voted for Democratic candidates.

In some places Democratic candidates won by only a slim majority, receiving just 40 percent of the independent vote, but that was enough. That’s because Democratic registration and support outnumbers Republican registration and support nationally. Therefore, with the help of the independent vote, it was enough to cause the Republicans to lose control of both the Senate and the House.

Now if this was the beginning of a new trend, it would open the possibility of an enormous sweeping out of the Republicans from the Senate and Congress and, of course, from the White House in 2008. In 2006, only a slight majority of independents voted Democratic, but this year, with such huge numbers of independents coming out for Democratic campaign events and caucuses in Iowa, it could really be the beginning of an incredible trend.

And this trend was repeated in New Hampshire, even though it got lost in the media’s analysis of the New Hampshire results. The reason it was lost is that the pollsters predicted a huge landslide for Obama, and then when he came in second, with practically as many votes as Hillary Clinton, it still wasn’t the big landslide that was predicted, so it was reported as a big loss.

However, the trend that started in Iowa also held true in New Hampshire. Again a majority of independents, a solid majority – because they are almost a third of the voters in New Hampshire – came out and voted for Democrats. There were undecided independents in New Hampshire who voted Republican, but the overwhelming majority of independents voted Democratic, so we now have the second major election in a row where the independent vote has shifted away from Republicans. This means, of course, that the writing is on the wall for the Republicans in November.

PA: What other trends do you see emerging?

JW: There are other important new features in this campaign that aren’t being focused on very much by the major media, although we certainly try to stress them in our coverage in the People’s Weekly World. One big difference in this campaign is the role being played by the labor movement. It started with that huge rally at Soldier’s Field in Chicago this past summer, when a retired steelworker named Steve Skvara, came to the microphone and spoke about his difficulties getting affordable health insurance for his wife, and asked the candidates, 'What's wrong with America?'

It was really interesting. There I was in the “spin room” with all the other media, and when the workers stood up and began to speak, that was when the mainstream media stopped listening. The noise got so bad I had to run up to the monitors and turn up the sound.

All of the journalists and TV and radio people were running around grabbing snacks and chatting among themselves, because they figured that was the unimportant part of the evening. The candidates weren’t speaking yet, so the media types had an opportunity to eat and kibitz among themselves.

Most of them basically ignored the presentations that working people made at that forum. I think that was a big detriment to coming up with a good analysis of the event. Because what was being put forward by Steve Skvara, the retired steelworker, and the other workers who spoke was about their struggle to make ends meet and to survive as families, has gone on to become a driving force in this election.

Things were a lot different, too, at the Iowa caucuses, which I covered. Traditionally, the people who win a caucus are the people who have the most cars, vans and buses, and can bring out the most people to the polling places. It has historically always been a very highly controlled, tightly organized little event.

Not so with this year’s Iowa caucuses! It didn’t matter what kind of a polling operation you had, because the poll workers basically had to get out of the way of the avalanche of voters who were showing up on their own. They didn’t need to be bussed or pulled or yanked to the caucuses.

They were arriving in such large numbers that the people who were running the caucuses didn’t know what to do with them. At a caucus site where the cafeteria was adequate last time, they had to funnel the supporters of one candidate to the auditorium, the others had to go to cafeteria: “Anyone who supports this one, go to this classroom, etc.” At many caucus sites it was simply impossible to fit everybody into one room. That’s because people were really coming out, and they were coming out because they were angry about many different things.

There was a 55-year-old white woman I talked to at the Obama rally in Des Moines. When I asked her why she was there, she said she was really upset about the state of things in the country. She was working for a management consultant firm, and she got laid off and lost her pension. Her best friend’s son, she also told me, was killed in Iraq. And that was it – she had had it! “If I come in here and vote for Barack Obama, that is the best thing I can do to shake things up and show that we need something altogether new,” she said.

PA: Obama started talking about change. Then all the other candidates started talking about change – after it became clear that this was what people were demanding. But “change” is really something kind of vague and ethereal. What is your sense of this?

JW: When I spoke to people about why they were out there, they generally had a good idea about what it is that is standing between where we are now and change. They may not exactly know the full ramifications of it all, but they do know that there are some powerful forces standing between where we are now and the change that everybody wants.

They identify these forces as money-hungry, profit-grabbing companies. More specifically they identify them as health insurance companies that don’t provide adequate health care. They also identify them as the big corporations that export their jobs overseas.

So people have a good idea of the forces that stand between where we are now and the change that they want. I think they are looking for candidates who will express that desire for change, and they are coming out in huge numbers, bringing the passion that they have about these issues to the polling places.

I think you can see that in both states where people have voted so far. It also largely explains, Obama’s success in these elections, because he speaks more to that desire for change. In New Hampshire, for instance, he spoke of himself as riding a wave: “The people are the wave, he said, “and I’m the one that’s riding it.” That is really to a large extent what is happening.

Even in the labor movement, there was a time in the not too distant past when the labor movement played a much more passive role in elections. But this time, starting even before the Soldier Field event, they have laid out the issues: Labor is saying that we need the right to organize, we need to stop the exportation of jobs; we need to have decent wages; we need the Employee Free Choice Act. All these issues are being laid out by them. The unions are really putting these issues out there this time, and they are actively campaigning for them and for the candidates who support them on these issues.

The labor movement now says, “This is what we need; this is what we want, this is what the people have earned,” and then they put that out and organize a movement around it. They themselves organize a movement around those issues, and the candidates have to come along.

You saw the effect of that in the New Hampshire debates, how the candidates were reflecting specifically what people have been demanding. Hillary Clinton warned about a coming recession and its impact on the people. Obama talked about what he said was the largest building in the world, a huge office tower in Cayman Islands where 12,000 corporations now make their headquarters – in this one building there! “That, he said, is “either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax shelter in the world.” John Edwards, of course, put forward his anti-corporate message and actually identified entrenched corporate interests as the thing that is preventing change, as the power that is standing between us and change. Then, on foreign policy, Obama called for renewing and stepping up nuclear nonproliferation. Edwards called for the President of the United States to be a person who leads a worldwide movement for nuclear disarmament.

All of this is one hell of a difference from what has usually been enunciated by major party candidates for the Presidency. Now their positions are much closer to the positions of the people’s movements than they have been in living memory. Again, it is not just that the candidates cleverly cooked up these positions. They are responding to the demands of longstanding movements in this country: the labor movement, the peace movement, the women’s rights and civil rights movements. All of these forces have been pushing for these things for a long time, and now you are finally seeing it being reflected by the candidates.