Rare News Desk
When Montana’s embattled Senator John Walsh threw in the towel on his campaign Friday, Democrats breathed a collectivist sigh of relief. They could finally cut their losses and move on. Teachers unions won’t be so lucky.
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Walsh was running to keep the seat he took over from longtime powerhouse Max Baucus last year. His chances of pulling that off were shot to hell when the New York Times revealed that he had extensively plagiarized a 14-page grad school thesis he wrote while studying at the Army War College seven years ago.
The scandal had turned to derision for Walsh and Democrats who rallied around him after he claimed that he committed academic fraud as a result of suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, from his tours of duty in Iraq.
Democrats in Montana were happy to see Walsh go. They realized his presence on the ticket was hurting their slim chances of winning the House seat currently held by Walsh’s Republican rival (and likely victor in November) Steve Daines.
Walsh finally announced his withdrawal days after his own aides – aides who would like to work for other Democrats in the future, thank you – told him that he needed to get out of the race.
The Dems will probably lose the seat but will otherwise get a pass here. Political parties are sort of expected to give their guys some leeway on scandals that don’t involve serious violations of law.
But for the teachers unions, who represent the nation’s public school teachers, the Walsh scandal is a far bigger embarrassment.
For the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, which financed Walsh’s campaign, along with its joint affiliate in the Big Sky State, their handling of the episode revealed the desperate lengths to which they will stand by supportive politicians regardless of their misbehavior.
Unlike Senate Democrats, who gave fairly lukewarm defenses of Walsh’s behavior, the NEA’s and AFT’s joint affiliate in Montana zealously stood by Walsh.
Late last month, Eric Feaver, the president of the Montana Education Association-Montana Federation of Teachers, issued a lengthy statement on Facebook proclaiming that Walsh still deserved the union’s support because he “is a man of the people.”
There’s also the fact that the NEA and AFT tossed in $20,000 – money coming from teachers who, for the most part, work hard to uphold high standards of ethical behavior in their classrooms – into Walsh’s campaign.
While the donations were made before the revelations of plagiarism surfaced, the two unions neither publicly asked Walsh to refund their money nor issued statements condemning his behavior. AFT President Randi Weingarten, never one to shy away from commenting on any issue, said nothing about Walsh since the accusations surfaced.
With Walsh having ended his Senate bid, you would think the Montana teachers union would be a tad more circumspect in backing candidates. Instead, the union announced on Facebook yesterday that it will support Amanda Curtis, a teacher and freshman state representative, in her bid to replace Walsh as the Democratic nominee.
NEA and AFT will follow their affiliate in any direction it takes. But it is more than likely that Curtis will lose out to either Lt. Gov. John Bohlinger or rancher Dirk Adams, both of whom lost to Walsh during the hard-fought Democratic senatorial primary this spring.
No matter what happens, the NEA and AFT have embarrassed themselves by supporting a candidate with a long history of unethical behavior who was revealed to have committed spectacular academic fraud. In fact, the two unions have long been more concerned with backing Democrats on the national level than with how their politicking could reflect badly on the teaching profession.
For younger, more reform-minded teachers, along with veterans concerned about building up the teaching profession, decisions by the NEA and AFT to back figures such as Walsh remind them of a harsh reality. The dues they are forced to pay to the unions are almost always geared toward political activities that rarely serve their interests.
Sometimes this support even makes a mockery of their profession.
