SEIU MEMBERS PREDICT EDWARDS ENDORSEMENT.

(Photos: SEIU members in John Edwards T-shirts provided by their SEIU locals. Washington, D.C., Sept. 17, 2007.)

It's hard sometimes in the heat of the moment to distinguish enthusiasm for a politician's rousing speech from enthusiasm for the politician himself. So in the cool of the evening I headed out to the courtyard of the Washington Hilton, where the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Political Action Conference attendees were mingling over drinks and nibbling on breaded shrimp, roast beef, and veggies. Despite the tremendous outpouring of enthusiasm for Barack Obama from the conference's audience of union leaders and regular members earlier in the day, member after member predicted that loyalty would trump enthusiasm, and that John Edwards, the candidate who has most assiduously courted labor, would win the SEIU's straw poll, and eventually the powerful and activist union's nod.

"I will fall off my chair tomorrow if he don't get it," said Tamekia Robinson of California's Local 1000, predicting a win for Edwards in the SEIU's straw poll, whose results will be announced tomorrow. "If he don't get it, I will be highly, highly, highly surprised."

Robinson, who described herself as an Obama supporter, said she was pleased that the membership was included in the endorsement process, even though she thinks the outcome is already foreordained. "I think it's nice they did their little fluff, their go-around, even though it was already concluded," she said. Three of the five largest SEIU locals have already called, at the conference, for an endorsement of Edwards, she noted. It would be hard for anyone to trump that.

"We had a meeting," explained Laurene Mackay of the United Long Term Care Workers, Local 6434, which she says endorsed Edwards in a membership vote "at the union." Mackay sported a T-shirt with the John Edwards campaign logo on it, printed in the SEIU colors of yellow on purple, that her local had given her. "We had already chosen who we were going to vote for," she explained. "Then we got the T-shirts."

Those T-shirts were a matter of some controversy with one of her table-mates, Larry Perkins of Local 1000. "I was O.K. with the presentations today with everyone until they got to John Edwards," he said. "Then I saw all these purple and yellow T-shirts with "John Edwards" on them and I didn't see shirts for anybody else. It was like they were steering people to John Edwards." Of course, Perkins himself had been an Edwards man until he saw that. "It was like, man, this was engineered," he said.

Others ranked the support of the crowd as putting Edwards in the lead, with Obama in second, and Hillary Clinton a close third or even with Obama. "Edwards was number one in there, to people responding to him," said Rita Stephenson, also of Local 1000, who personally liked Clinton and Edwards best. "Obama was second. She was maybe third." Her dinner companion, Attila Gabor of Local 1021, agreed about Obama. "I think he got a very good reception but I think Edwards was on top of him," he said, lifting his hand up to his face to demonstrate how high the support for Edwards stretched.

Jason Morales, of Local 1199 United Healthcare East (one of the three which has called for an SEIU endorsement of Edwards at the conference, according to Robinson), said that he came out of the day most pleasantly surprised by Chris Dodd's performance. "I thought he was going to be dull and boring," he said, but "the energy that he had and that he brought to the table" was impressive. Morales had kind words for Obama, too, whom he called "unbelievable, a great speaker." But when pressed about where his support lay, Morales eventually gave the most frequently heard answer.

"I like Edwards," he said. "He's a labor man."

--Garance Franke-Ruta