Vice President Joe Biden will appear at 11 a.m. Thursday at Renton Technical College, scheduling a public event to go along with the closed-door fundraising that has characterized his trips and those of President Obama to the Puget Sound area.

Biden will speak to a U.S. Department of Labor job-driven training grant program, in which Renton Technical and 269 other community colleges have received $450 million from the federal government.

The event will, however, be for an audience from within the college and not a rally-style public appearance.

The vice president’s main mission is to appear at Sen. Maria Cantwell’s annual Women of Valor luncheon, which honors civic and business achievers. The luncheon will be held at the Washington State Trade and Convention Center.

The Cantwell luncheon will also benefit women of ambition.

The event will raise money for Democratic women running for the Senate in Kentucky, Georgia and West Virginia — including Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is challenging Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell — as well as the reelection campaigns of Sens. Kay Hagan in North Carolina, Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire and Mary Landrieu in Louisiana.

Cantwell has gone all-out to support Landrieu in fund-raising forays to the Puget Sound area, although Landrieu is an ally of Big Oil and Cantwell is a champion of renewable energy.

Landrieu is chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. A conservative coal-state Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, recently warned about one consequence of Landrieu losing her seat. If Democrats keep Senate control, Cantwell would become chair of the Energy Committee.

Biden is probably relieved to get out of Washington, D.C., to the “left coast.”

The vice president has been under fire for recent remarks made at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

He spoke on the fight against terror, saying “our biggest problem is our allies” in the Middle East, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. He said they “pour hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons” to the fight against Syrian’s President Bashir Assad, only to see the resources go to “extremist elements of jihadis.”

Biden has been explaining himself and apologizing for the remark: Some have joked that it met the classic definition of a gaffe in Washington, D.C., namely bluntly speaking an officially unmentioned truth.

Biden was in Seattle two years ago for a Cantwell fund-raiser. He made a Democratic fund-raising foray in May that was never announced to Northwest media, and met at Boeing Field with donors to the reelection campaign of U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash.

The last Democratic vice president, Al Gore, made no fewer than 16 visits to the area during President Clinton’s second term. Travels took Gore from the summit of 14,410-foot summit of Mt. Rainier to the Hanford Reach National Monument on the Columbia River, to a flood-caused sinkhole in Shoreline.