Romney’s Pirouette With The NAACP

Yesterday Mitt Romney addressed the NAACP. Not surprisingly he wasn’t very well received. He actually gave a pretty good speech if all that was required was highlighting why a Romney administration would be better for blacks than a second Obama administration. He’s right of course but that message wasn’t going to be heard by the NAACP crowd. Romney tossed around statistic after statistic then made the fatal error of declaring he would repeal Obamacare. The NAACP is a group of radical leftists, all of Romney’s statistics fell on deaf ears by a group that needed to hear a message on foundational viewpoints.

Barack Obama has been a disaster for blacks. Black unemployment is 14.4%, down only 0.4% since Obama took office. In fact, black unemployment jumped 0.8% in June alone. Young blacks are unemployed at the staggeringly high rate of 39%. Obama eliminated school choice in Washington DC, thus forcing black kids into failing neighborhood government schools. Inner city schools remain terrible, propped up by the policies of Obama. Inner city violence is up dramatically in the last four years, Chicago’s murder rate for example is up 38%. That disproportionately affects blacks. The poor economy is hitting the black community in more ways than one.

No doubt Romney’s policies would be better for blacks. A lower tax rate for everyone, along with tax certainty, would boost the economy which will help everyone including blacks. Allowing school choice for inner city kids in DC would be good for them. Romney has talked about tying Federal education money to the child rather than handing out grants to schools. While I oppose government education and in particular Federal education spending, tying money to a student would force schools to compete for students thus increasing education standards and student output. All of this is good for the black community.

But the NAACP isn’t thinking along these lines. This is a group that has adopted a radical leftist outlook. It no longer is the group that it was when it was founded, that being a group dedicated to the end of Jim Crow. It’s now a group filled with radicals and they don’t care about the black unemployment rate. They don’t want to hear a message about no one ever saying there was to much free enterprise in a community. That’s because they’ll say exactly that. This is a group filled with the remanent of the Saul Alinsky 60′s, a group that believes not only is the big corporate CEO evil but so is the local merchant. We’re talking about people who truly believe the local merchant is trying to screw blacks by selling goods at a profit.

As such, to come to a NAACP meeting with a series of statistics and some vague plans for economic change in a free market direction isn’t going to be heard by these people. They don’t care about the statistics and the Romney solution is the opposite of what they want. The only way to approach a group like the NAACP is to take them head on. Romney should have made a substantive argument for capitalism and against big government socialism. Dancing around the subject only enrages the NAACP more and it annoys Romney’s base. 

Romney should have laid out what capitalism is, why it’s good for the black community and every other group in America and he should have laid out in detail how big government socialism has failed America and in particular blacks. Instead Romney danced around everything and once again looked like the lukewarm, johnny come lately conservative that he is. If we can give him something from this speech it’s that he did not offer up a laundry list of big government goodies, he remained true to his claim of being a smaller government conservative. That’s at least something positive to take away from this otherwise mediocre encounter with the NAACP.