Howard Dean recently took a giant step toward landing the Democratic nomination with endorsements from two big unions that represent government employees, AFCSME and SEIU. As Stefan Gleason of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation points out in an article today on National Review Online , getting the manpower of these two aggressive unions will be of enormous help in the early primaries.

Gleason makes the crucial point about organized labor–private sector unions can and often do price their workers out of jobs, but with government as the employer, there is no such worry. Dean could be counted on to expand government employment as much as possible in pursuit of his various ideological goals, and the unions would be right on hand to siphon off some of the pay going to each new “worker.”