McELROY

WASHINGTON — Far from dimming prospects for sending a Democrat to the White House, this year’s epic nominating contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton has been good for the party — and for American labor, according to the Rhode Islander who is stepping down as the leader of one of the nation’s biggest trade unions.

Edward J. McElroy Jr. ventured a few other blunt views recently as he previewed the 2008 elections and looked back on a four-decade rise to top job at the American Federation of Teachers.

He said, for example, that President Bill Clinton might have made “historically great strides on the race issue” in this country, if it had not been for the personal “distractions” during his second term.

He said Democratic presidential candidate Obama must deal “head-on” with a racial thread that doesn’t just touch education but runs through a whole fabric of social issues.

“Crime, poverty, jobs, schools, delivery of health care — all of these things have some race piece and you’ve got to deal with it that way. You can’t deal with it by masking it, by saying well it doesn’t exist,” McElroy said. “Huge populations of kids in these cities that don’t have a father, that are raised by their grandparents — most of these kids aren’t white kids. Most of those kids are minority kids. It’s an issue,” he said with a wry nod to Bill Cosby. “Just say it.”

McElroy said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s collaboration with President Bush on a mandatory grade-school testing law was a well-intended mistake that yielded “a disaster” because it approached public education in isolation from other social issues — and in too punitive a fashion.

If all that sounds like the analysis of a traditional labor-movement liberal, McElroy, the 67-year-old president of the 1.4-million-member teachers union, would probably not quarrel with the label. “From my time as a newly minted junior high school teacher, I knew that being a part of the AFT would help me make a difference,” McElroy said earlier this year when he announced his plan to retire.

The son of a textile and machinists union member from Providence, McElroy began his career in 1962, teaching social studies and English at Lockwood Junior High School in Warwick. At the time, organized labor and U.S. manufacturing were in their postwar heyday. More than one American worker in every three held a union card — a figure that has since fallen to well below one in ten.

But public employees had comparatively weak negotiating powers. McElroy once recalled how he relied on the superior numbers of the steelworkers and other trade unions when he needed phone banks and other help to organize fellow teachers.

McElroy became president of the Warwick Teachers Union in 1967 and later the Rhode Island Federation of Teachers, holding both jobs for a long stretch of his career. In 1977, he became president of the state AFL-CIO and began to take on assignments around the country for the national leadership.

McElroy figured in the enactment of the state law that permitted teachers to engage in collective bargaining and gave rise to the teachers’ pensions that remain the norm today. He also assisted in controversial legislation in the late 1980s that granted state pension credits to union employees, himself included, who were engaged in union duties.

Organizing public workers and increasing their political clout have been the twin missions of a career that brought McElroy to Washington in 1992, as secretary-treasurer of the AFT, the second-largest teachers union, after the National Education Association. McElroy has also been an adherent of the overseas ambitions — such as support of Poland’s Solidarity movement — that the late Lane Kirkland advocated as AFL-CIO chief.

McElroy became president of the AFT in 2004. The union says his time in its national leadership has coincided with a surge of 500,000 new members to the current total of 1.4 million. Public employee unions, meanwhile, have taken a progressively larger fraction of organized labor’s ranks, as manufacturing employment has declined.

During an interview in an office overlooking the Capitol, McElroy recounted episodes from a career deeply invested in politics — and rarely more so than in the current presidential campaign. “You hear a lot about how terrible it was to have a primary campaign going on that long,” he said, alluding to the battle between Obama and Clinton. The AFT endorsed the New York senator early, based on a relationship dating to her days as the first lady of Arkansas in the 1980s.

“I was standing on street corners in New Hampshire with my members” in the days before Clinton’s dramatic comeback victory last winter in the nation’s first primary, McElroy said. “The best thing about that campaign was her,” he said, recalling a mounting enthusiasm for Clinton that was “palpable.”

But McElroy said it also became clear during the nominating struggle that Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, had mapped out and followed an ingenious strategy that made the most of his organizing skills and minimized Clinton’s early advantages by focusing on labor-intensive caucus states, as well as smaller states and “red” — or Republican-leaning — states where the delegate allocation rules allowed him to prosper.

Now the union is committed, McElroy said, to helping Obama expand his hunt for electoral votes into a number of states — such as Colorado — that have often gone Republican in presidential races but also have a significant union membership. That’s why he reasons that the extended nominating battle was a useful preparation for the fall campaign against the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

“We had never run a real primary campaign at that level that engages all the members in states across the country,” McElroy said, arguing that the organizing experience will pay dividends in November.

McElroy disputes the view that Clinton’s strength in attracting the support of white, working-class voters and older voters will translate into an Obama weakness among those blocs.

McElroy said he is concerned that Obama’s campaign may be hurt to some degree by a racial factor that stops somewhere short of overt opposition to the idea of a black president, stemming more from unfamiliarity than outright hostility. “I’m old enough to be concerned about that,” he said.

Therefore, he said that Obama must continue to deal directly with the issue of race.

On the plus side, he said of Obama, “You hardly ever have people come along who can actually have that discussion” with voters.

It was in that context that McElroy took aim at the “No Child Left Behind” law, which Kennedy helped Mr. Bush get through Congress early in his first term. The law requires testing of elementary school students in basis skills that is explicitly meant to uncover teaching shortcomings in individual schools — and in extreme cases impose penalties on schools that do not improve.

“Drill and kill for testing,” as McElroy described it, is particularly harsh on urban schools whose populations are disproportionately black and does not deal with “other problems that these kids may take into school,” such as poverty and deficient housing.

McElroy says Obama is in a good position to improve the testing system — and deal with a variety of other domestic issues, including policies to make union organizing easier.

As for himself, McElroy said he hopes to keep trying to make a difference, remaining for a time in the Washington area to help the new leaders of the AFT. Meanwhile, though, he and his wife, Edwina, an elementary school teacher in Fairfax County, Va., are halfway home, in a sense. They have bought a townhouse in West Warwick and foresee spending more of their time back there.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com