First in an occasional series examining how major interest groups bring their power to bear on the presidential campaign.
WASHINGTON - Bill Comer, a former civics teacher, left his home in Denver and moved to Des Moines last August, six months be-
fore the Iowa caucuses. His cause: Al Gore.
When Comer arrived in Iowa, teachers there were evenly divided in their loyalties to Gore and Bill Bradley, according to a National Education Association poll. Comer's task was to switch the teachers' allegiance to Gore and get them to the caucuses in January.
''My job was to bring the best case for Mr. Gore to our members and have them support him,'' said Comer, 64, a paid NEA organizer who is now surveying the general election landscape in Oregon, Nevada, and Michigan.
Comer is just one reason that teachers are considered one of the most powerful and effective interest groups in presidential politics. Months before most other Democratic constituencies began organizing, the NEA was in the field. Now, in the general election, Comer and the NEA are organizing again to help Gore try to beat Texas Governor George W. Bush the way he beat Bradley during the primaries.
From their top union leaders in Washington to their 16,000 local associations and 2.5 million members in cities and towns, the teachers are involved in every aspect of the 2000 presidential race.
''As far back as I can remember, a significant portion of all convention delegates were members of NEA,'' said Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political science professor. ''They were certainly the group that Jimmy Carter mobilized in 1976, and they have been a major element of every winning coalition of every Democratic nominee.''
Unlike President Clinton, Baker said, Gore has hewed close to the needs and desires of the teachers as he seeks their help in his campaign. And Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that if Gore wins, there will be a payoff for teachers unions.
''They get a president who's probably going to veto any bill that has the slightest hint of a voucher program in it,'' Loveless said. ''They're going to get a president who's probably going to propose new spending programs on education. They get quite a bit out of it.''
But in the interim, as Gore has pressed his campaign, the teachers have been giving, not getting.
When Gore came to Faneuil Hall on March 4, for example, busloads of teachers filled the old meetingplace, cheering him on. Their presence helped make the event look good for television and served as a reminder to Gore that he owed the teachers for their hard work.
In Iowa, New Hampshire, and other key primary states, teachers knocked on doors, staffed telephone banks, and helped get out the vote for Gore. In New York, members of the United Federation of Teachers helped distribute more than one million fliers for Gore in one day. In Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Teachers Association contacted each of its 90,000 members three times by phone and by mail, urging them to vote for Gore over Bradley.
And at the NEA headquarters in the nation's capital, union officials constantly poll their members to find out what they think about Gore's education proposals versus Bush's plans. The information is used to help the union sell its members and their families on Gore.
In return, union leaders gain access to Gore and his campaign. Before the vice president delivered a major address outlining his vision for public education at Graceland College in Iowa last year, he briefed NEA president Bob Chase and American Federation of Teachers president Sandra Feldman in separate, private meetings at the Old Executive Office Building.
Chase and Feldman were briefed again last month by a Gore policy aide shortly before the vice president gave speeches on education accountability in Dallas and on teacher quality in Lansing, Mich.
When the memorial service was held for the high school students killed at Columbine High School last year, Gore gave Chase a lift on Air Force Two.
The teachers and their unions have long been a force in American politics. From 1991 to 1999, for example, contributions to the Democratic Party from the NEA, AFT, and the Service Employees International Union, which includes some education workers, totaled $6.7 million, making teachers by far the party's biggest donor bloc, according to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity. The largest single contributor to Democrats - the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees - gave $3.7 million in that period.
''There's no question that groups donating millions of dollars like the teachers unions have special access and are able to reach in and affect public policy in ways that others are not able to do, and that's not acceptable,'' said Peter Eisner, the center's managing director.
In 1976, the teachers were widely credited with forming the coalition that elected Carter. In return, Carter created the Department of Education.
Conversely, teachers were galvanized to work against Bob Dole in 1996. At the Republican National Convention in San Diego, he called the NEA a reform-killing arm of the Democratic Party, more concerned about teachers than students. That led teachers nationwide to wear blue buttons declaring, ''I am the NEA.'' While Dole's candidacy suffered from a multitude of problems, incurring the teachers' wrath did not help.
''You have a huge cadre of workers out there, the value of whose work doesn't really show up on any formal report,'' said Charlene Haar, president of the Education Policy Institute, a conservative group that takes a dim view of the teachers' political activity. ''The unions do polling for candidates, they provide consultants, they help them with developing advertising, the list goes on and on.''
Comer, a former Colorado legislator, is just one of those NEA staff members who spend their time working on campaigns and ballot measures. When he arrived in Iowa, long before the snow started to fall, a rising excitement about Bradley, and a sense of indifference toward Gore, permeated the atmosphere.
From an initial list of 30 names, Comer began identifying volunteers who would help him make phone calls. Of the 32,000 Iowa State Education Association members, Comer concentrated on the 10,000 who said they were Democrats and planned to attend the caucuses.
Then Comer went to work on the Democratic teachers who were not in the Gore camp.
To do that, Comer stressed the issue that riles unionized teachers the most - vouchers for private schools. Gore opposes the use of vouchers, arguing that allowing public funds to subsidize private schools drains tax dollars badly needed by public schools. Others view vouchers as a crucial tool to stimulate excellence and accountability in education, and as a gesture of fairness to lower and middle-income students caught in failing public schools.
At the outset of his campaign, Bradley, a former New Jersey senator, said he would oppose vouchers, although he had voted for them in the Senate on numerous occasions.
NEA president Chase closely questioned both Gore and Bradley about it during their videotaped interviews with him for the union's endorsement. Traveling around Iowa, Comer made much use of the tape.
''We rolled the tape with his own words and his own body language and said, `There it is, don't believe me, believe him,''' Comer recalled.
The videotape showed an uncomfortable-looking Bradley telling Chase that he still wonders if vouchers may not be a partial solution to the problems of public education. Bradley noted ongoing experiments in Cleveland and Milwaukee and said ''the jury is still out.''
The tape was deadly effective.
By the night of the caucuses, Comer estimates that of the 60,000 Iowa Democrats who participated, about 8,000 were teachers committed to Gore. The vice president won in a landslide.
All told, the NEA, with its 2.5 million members, is planning to spend millions this year on the campaign. Jack Pacheco, the union's political director, said the NEA will raise $6.5 million to $7.5 million for its political action committee to donate funds to the Democratic Party and individual candidates. The PAC money comes from voluntary donations from NEA members, not union dues, Pacheco said.
Politics has long been a central concern of the NEA.
According to a 1992-93 NEA record of its spending obtained by the Globe, the organization spent 10 times as much of its budget on political activity ($34.7 million) as on ensuring excellence in public education ($3.3 million) or improving professional standards and working conditions for all education employees ($3 million).
The document laid out the association's budget and actual spending by strategic objective, with a total of $167 million spent that year. The largest category - $61.7 million - went to attracting and representing members. Pacheco said the NEA has since ended its practice of using dues to pay for political contributions, reserving that for its political action committee.
But Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education for research and improvement, called that ''a phony distinction,'' and said the NEA's money is fungible, whether it comes from member dues or contributions.
Regardless of how the union finances its political activism, Finn said, ''The problem I see is that needed and important reforms are less likely to be made because of the clout the teachers and the unions wield.''
With the primaries ended, the unions are still at work, trying to get their members elected as delegates to both the Democratic and Republican national conventions this summer.
Though there is no estimate available for the number of teachers attending the 2000 conventions, the number has been considerable over the years. In 1996, according to Pacheco, about 425 NEA teachers attended the Democratic Convention in Chicago out of a total of 4,289 delegates. About 75 NEA members served as delegates to the Republican Convention in San Diego out of the 1,990 delegates.
Despite all the teachers' political activism, they don't always get what they want from their candidate. Before giving his Graceland speech in Lamoni, Iowa, Gore told Chase and Feldman that he would propose testing all new teachers and allow schools to hire teachers based on their expertise, without regard to seniority.
Both ideas have long been anathema to the unions. NEA officials insist that they support testing of new teachers, but not existing ones, and in April the AFT proposed a national test for new teachers.
On May 5 in Michigan, Gore served up two more controversial ideas: setting standards for teacher tenure based partly on student performance and giving bonuses to good teachers based in part on student performance.
But so invested are the unions in Gore that the NEA president wouldn't admit to any disagreements.
''Even if there are,'' Chase said, ''I wouldn't speak about them.''
