February 20, 2010 05:41 PM UTC

Pat Caddell's Side of the Story

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• by: Colorado Pols

Originally posted at the Daily Caller a couple of days ago, but after all the time we spent in the last couple of weeks on ex-Andrew Romanoff campaign strategist Pat Caddell’s consorting with the right wing’s most vilified talking heads, and attacks on the Democratic Party in general at every opportunity, we thought his take on his termination by Romanoff’s campaign was worth noting:

Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell on Wednesday blasted the Obama White House for creating “a world in which there is no dissent,” following his banishment from Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff’s campaign for Senate.

Caddell, in a phone interview with The Daily Caller, doubled down on the comments he made in November that he said public sector employee unions in Colorado used as leverage to get him tossed from the Romanoff campaign.

“What I said about Andy Stern and the SEIU? Sure, they’re thugs,” said Caddell, a former adviser to President Jimmy Carter, who until Monday* had an informal advising role with the primary challenger to incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet.

Caddell said he does not fault Romanoff, a former state House speaker, for cutting ties with him after his remarks from November – in which he called the Service Employee Union International (SEIU) “thugs” and said the goal of the environmental movement is to “deconstruct capitalism” – were made public.

But Caddell said the comments were pushed into the public spotlight by the state chapters of the SEIU and the AFL-CIO, who called on the Romanoff campaign to get rid of him or risk losing any chance of getting labor’s endorsement.

“The unions have been considering endorsing Romanoff, and basically they told him that if I was involved with the campaign, ‘sayonara,’ which I think is the definition of thuggery isn’t it?” said Caddell, who has worked for a who’s who of Democratic politicians over the last few decades, including Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, Mario Cuomo and Gary Hart.

Mike Cerbo, the executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO, said he called Romanoff after hearing of Caddell’s comments but denied applying pressure on the candidate to get rid of his adviser.

However you feel about unions, it’s tough to argue with the AFL-CIO being upset that Caddell was anywhere near Romanoff’s campaign. It’s a little screwy to be asking for the endorsement of organizations your campaign strategist calls “thugs” on national television, isn’t it? And it wasn’t just labor who was incensed at the things Romanoff’s ex-strategist was on record saying, the enviro crowd’s jaws dropped every bit as much at Caddell’s suggestion that the goal of environmentalists is to “deconstruct capitalism.” Safe to say, as much as Caddell wants to pin his firing on a catchall ogre like “the unions,” there was enough outrage for everybody.

Which leads to the obvious question, a question nobody has satisfactorily answered: what was Pat Caddell supposed to be doing for Andrew Romanoff?