Former NAACP President Kweisi Mfume was basking in the overwhelming endorsement of the state teachers union in the Democratic race for U.S. Senate, as Rep. Ben Cardin was haunted by actions he took on teacher pensions as House of Delegates speaker in the 1980s.
The largest labor organization in the state, the 64,000-member Maryland State Teachers Association, gave Mfume more than 80 percent of the vote at representative assembly held in Columbia on Saturday. “I was very pleased at the endorsement, because it represented months of work reaching out and talking to teachers,” Mfume said.
Bill Brown, an MSTA delegate who teaches in Montgomery County and attended both endorsement events, said Cardin emphasized that “he was the one who had the most money and most experience.”
“He was the most animated I have ever seen him,” said Brown, an Mfume supporter.
It was an unusual loss of a labor endorsement for Cardin, who has gotten the backing of the Maryland and D.C. AFL-CIO and most of the major unions, and has raised five times as much money as Mfume.
Several people who attended the event attributed the loss to Cardin?s role in changing the state pension system for teachers in 1979 and 1984. Those changes reduced future benefits and angered most teachers. The reductions were the major reason MSTA mounted a successful campaign this year to increase benefits, moving Maryland out of the bottom ranks of the states in pensions.
Cardin spokesman Oren Shur that “there?s been a lot of misinformation” about the congressman?s position as speaker of the House.
“Ben Cardin led the fight to give teachers more pension options,” Shur said.
MSTA spokesman Dan Kaufman said Cardin “was involved in moderating the problems” but “there was some problem” related to the pension changes.
Speakers at the convention also emphasized that Mfume would bring diversity to the top of the ticket and would “add more perspective and balance to the U.S. Senate,” Kaufman said.
