AFL-CIO Prez: Obama in Bed With Tea Party

America's top union official delivered a verbal slap to President Obama today, saying Obama has hopped aboard the Tea Party bandwagon while throwing jobs under the bus, reports Talking Points Memo. So it's decision time, says the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka: Obama can buckle down on unemployment, or he can “continue to work with the Tea Party to offer cuts to middle-class programs like Social Security, all the while pretending the deficit is where our economic problems really lie.” And if he takes the latter route, Trumka says his union might just skip the Democratic convention.

“If they don't have a jobs program I think we'd better use our money doing other things,” Trumka told a Christian Science Monitor roundtable. Obama’s latest job-creation measures, like extending the payroll tax cut, are just “nibbly things that aren't going to make a difference.” Trumka is on Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, but he says “it's a legitimate question whether that commission has done anything worthwhile.” Obama first went wrong “when he confused job crisis with the deficit crisis a number of months ago,” Trumka concludes. (More Richard Trumka stories.)