Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the American Federation of Teachers’ 88th national convention, July 25, 2024, in Houston.
Credit: AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez
It may well just have been a case of fortuitous timing but Vice President Kamala Harris – the likely Democratic nominee for the presidency – gave her most full-throated address since President Biden ended his reelection campaign to an auditorium filled with enthusiastic teachers.
She articulated what seem likely to be the principal lines of attack in what, for her, will be one of the shortest presidential campaigns in America history. She also reprised some of the education issues that have figured prominently in her career so far.
Speaking Thursday in Houston at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers, which, as she noted, was the first union to endorse her candidacy, her speech was in effect a paean of praise not only to teachers, but to everyone working in schools, from bus drivers to nurses.
As she has many times, she paid tribute to her 1st grade teacher at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley Mrs. Frances Wilson.
“I am a proud product of public education,” she said in a not-so-subtle rebuttal to President Trump and his allies’ disparaging descriptions of public schools as “government schools” intent on indoctrinating students with left-wing and “woke” ideologies.
“It is because of Mrs. Wilson and many teachers like her that I stand before you as the Vice President of the United States, and why I am running to become President of the United States,” she said.
“You all do God’s work teaching our children,” she told the teachers, all of whom are union members.
In what could become the signature slogan of her campaign, Harris framed the contest as one between the future and the past.
“In this moment we are in a fight for our most fundamental freedoms,” she said, pausing dramatically. “And to this room of leaders, I say, bring it on.”
She repeated “bring it on” three times, as the audience roared “bring it on” back to her.
She said the choice was clear between “two different visions” – one focused on the future, and another on the past, and “we are fighting for the future.”
Teachers by the very nature of their work are engaged in creating America’s future.
“You see potential in every child,” she said. “You shape the future of our nation.”
“While you teach students about democracy, extremists attack us on the right to vote,” she declared.
And she criticized Republican resistance to gun control, less than a week after a 20-year-old inexperienced gunman nearly assassinated her likely opponent with an AR-15 rifle.
“They have the nerve to tell teachers to strap on a gun in the classroom, while they refuse to pass common sense gun safety laws,” she said.
She also took on some of the ideological issues raised by Republicans and the far-right that have roiled the education landscape.
“While you (the teachers) teach about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn, and to acknowledge our nation’s full history, including book bans,” she declared. “We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books.”
She doubled down on the Biden administration’s ambitious efforts to ease the burden of student loan debt — efforts that have been stymied by lawsuits brought by Republicans and their allies blocking his most ambitious loan forgiveness plans.
She described a teacher in Philadelphia she met recently who had been paying off her student loan for 20 years, but still had $40,000 to pay off, despite being part of the public service loan program that has been in place for years.
“We forgave it all,” she said.
Her appearance before the AFT, the second-largest teacher’s union after the National Education Association, may also have been fortuitous for practical reasons.
In addition to their financial contributions, teachers’ unions have a large network of volunteers they can draw on to go out into communities, knock on doors, and make phone calls to mobilize support for the candidates they back.
Both unions have now formally endorsed her.
It is that kind of backing that will make a big difference in the outcome of what almost everyone, regardless of their political affiliation, acknowledges is likely to be a close race.
