“Sending A Message To White Moderates”: Mitt Romney “Expected” Boos From People Who Want “Free Stuff”
Members of the NAACP will no doubt be excited to know they weren’t just used as props to send a message to white moderates that Mitt Romney would be all inclusive and stuff—they were also used to send a message to the Republican base that Romney is not afraid to talk sternly to and be booed by the colored people:
“I think we expected that,” he said on Fox Business Network, referring to the audience’s negative response. “I am going to give the same message to the NAACP that I give across the country, which is that Obamacare is killing jobs.”
See that, Republican base? Mitt Romney really really hates Obamacare, no matter who he’s talking to. Does that not light your hair on fire? Well, I hope you saved some of your hair, because here’s another hair-lighter: Speaking at a Montana fundraiser later in the day, Romney took it a step past having expected the boos, saying:
When I mentioned I am going to get rid of Obamacare, they weren’t happy … That’s okay, I want people to know what I stand for, and if I don’t stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that’s just fine. But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from the government, tell them to go vote for the other guy—more free stuff. But don’t forget nothing is really free.
So he was making a stand at the NAACP convention, making sure people knew they were not going to be getting any free stuff from him, no sir (not unless you’re super rich and by “free stuff” you mean giant tax breaks). Steve Benen puts this in context with a reminder that black people aren’t the only ones whose desire for free stuff Romney likes to talk about. In fact, he also thinks women needing preventive health care and young people struggling to pay their college tuition are just in search of free stuff.
To an outsider, Romney is doing a pretty good job looking like the asshole the Republican base wants its candidate to be, but the fact that at this late date he is still forced to send signals to the Republican base that he’s one of them, rather than being able to take their commitment to him for granted and focus solely on making white moderates think he’s inclusive, is a sign of weakness no matter how he tries to spin those boos.
By: Laura Clawson, Daily Kos, July 12, 2012
“Ricochet Pander Approach”: Romney Spins Economic Lies To The NAACP
On Wednesday morning Mitt Romney addressed the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. In most recent years Republican presidents and candidates have avoided speaking to the NAACP. That makes sense, since they oppose civil rights.
But Romney is pursuing the ricochet pander approach to the general election that George W. Bush laid out in 2000. He pretends to reach out to blacks and Latinos, but the real purpose is making white suburban soccer moms feel like they are not intolerant if they vote for him. That’s why he released an education agenda that mimics much of Bush’s education rhetoric about offering a fair shot to disadvantaged youth.
Unfortunately, Romney did not tell the truth in his speech on Wednesday. Consider this key section:
The opposition charges that I and people in my party are running for office to help the rich. Nonsense. The rich will do just fine whether I am elected or not. The President wants to make this a campaign about blaming the rich. I want to make this a campaign about helping the middle class.
I am running for president because I know that my policies and vision will help hundreds of millions of middle-class Americans of all races, will lift people from poverty, and will help prevent people from becoming poor. My campaign is about helping the people who need help.
This is simply a lie. It is a demonstrable fact that Romney’s economic policies—cutting taxes on the rich and cutting spending on programs that aid the poor—is designed to help the rich get even richer. Now, Romney may subscribe to the discredited supply side theory that ultimately increasing wealth at the top will increase investment and generate economic growth that lowers unemployment. But there is no question he is running for office to help the rich. (If you don’t believe me, read today’s analysis of Romney’s tax plans from Wall Street veteran Henry Blodget.)
In his remarks Romney emphasized his education reform plan, something he has almost never talked about since he announced it. Rather than showing that he is serious about improving social mobility, this reaffirms that he is simply copying the Bush playbook on how to pretend you care about poor urban children while promising to cut programs they depend on, such as Medicaid.
The rest of Romney’s speech was the same pitch he makes to every group: the economy is stagnant, and I will grow it. You could do a find-and-replace for “Latinos,” “women,” “African-Americans” or, for that matter, “Inuits” and his speech would be the same.
There is no question that the economic downturn has been especially hard on black families. But Romney seems to either not know or not care that people have other political interests besides macroeconomic indicators. The NAACP was set up to advocate for legal equality for African-Americans. The last Republican president, George W. Bush, eviscerated legal protections against racial discrimination. His Equal Employment Opportunity Commission only concerned itself with “reverse discrimination” while he appointed federal judges who are hostile to civil rights. Will Romney do the same? He did not say.
Nor did Romney have anything to say about the fact that his own church, in which he became a prominent leader, openly discriminated against blacks until 1978. Romney never, to anyone’s knowledge, did anything to condemn the Mormon Church’s racism. The only thing he is reported to have ever said about it was that he thought it rude of other schools to boycott playing Brigham Young University in sports as an objection Mormonism’s racist policies. In other words, he was against using a classic device of the civil rights movement, a boycott, to promote integration.
No wonder he did not want to discuss civil rights on Wednesday. But the least he could have done is told the truth about his economic agenda.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, July 11, 2012
“Civic Engagement”: Will Mitt Romney Condemn Voter Suppression At NAACP Convention?
Mitt Romney is going to address the 103rd convention of the National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People Wednesday.
Good. In recent years, Republican politicians have tended to criticize the NAACP, when they should be reaching out to the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. Romney’s acceptance of the group’s invitation is the right response and he gets credit for showing up at the convention in Houston.
The Republican presidential contender’s topic Wednesday will be “civic engagement.”
Very good. In the United States, a republic that bends toward democracy, the highest form of civic engagement has historically taken the form of voting. Americans have suffered and struggled and died for the right to vote.
As NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous wisely notes: “If you let someone diminish the power of your vote you will already have lost a battle.”
Unfortunately, the NAACP and allied groups have been forced to re-fight too many old battles on behalf of voting rights in recent years.
Republican legislators in states across the country, working in conjunction with the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council — and, it was recently learned, the Republican National Committee — have sought to enact and implement so-called “Voted ID” laws. These laws have been condemned by good government groups, including the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, as assaults on voting rights.
The Voter ID laws, new restrictions on same-day registration and early-voting, purges of voting lists and other voter suppression schemes pose particular threats to civic engagement by African American voters and others who have historically faced discrimination based on their race, ethnicity or national origin.
“Our democracy is literally under attack from within. We have wealthy interests seeking to buy elections and when that ain’t enough, suppress the vote,” says Jealous. “There is no battle that is more important or urgent to the NAACP right now than the battle to preserve democracy itself. Let me be very clear, our right to vote is the right upon which our ability to defend every other right is leveraged.”
At the convention in Houston, Jealous and other NAACP activists have made the defense of voting rights a central focus. They are right to do so, especially in Texas, where local Republicans have been calling for the elimination of the Voting Rights Act — and where a newly-passed Voter ID law has been described by Attorney General Eric Holder as a 21st-century variation on the “poll tax.”
The question that Romney must answer Wednesday is a simple one: Which side is he on?
Is Romney on the side of the NAACP and campaigners for voting rights — including Republicans like his father, George Romney — or is he on the side of those who would suppress the vote?
If the prospective Republican nominee for president is really interested in “civic engagement,” he will call out those in his own party who seek to suppress voting rights.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, July 10, 2012
Lynch Law Lives On Stage And In Troy Davis Execution
When you visit Atlanta, ask about the death of Troy Davis, an execution by lethal injection as miles of people across land and sea kept a vigil until it came to pass at 11:08 p.m. last Wednesday evening.
Nice to know law and order—or do I mean lynch law and order?—prevails in the stubborn deep South, whatever the world thinks. Davis was put to death despite a slew of supporters, including dignitaries and law enforcement experts, who found shades of reasonable doubt in his murder case.
In a stroke of amazing timing and relevance, Georgia’s capital city is the setting of a tragical musical, Parade, based on a true story of a 1915 lynching. I just saw the brilliant production on opening night at Ford’s Theatre on 10th Street here in Washington—the very spot where Abraham Lincoln was shot at close range, by someone he never saw coming in the dark. A vengeful son of the South, an actor, played a Shakespearean scene for all he was worth—MacBeth, Lincoln’s favorite.
On that tragic April night, Lincoln was heartily enjoying a comedy. Similarly, all seems bright at first in this Ford’s Theatre play. Parade’s exuberant ensemble charms with spring songs, costumes, and revelry as the curtain opens on Atlanta’s celebration of “Confederate Memorial Day” in April 1913. But the holiday itself reveals the defiance of Atlanta’s white society, keeping the anti-Yankee candles burning.
The theatre director, Paul R. Tetreault, expertly captures the tableau of a wounded world that tells itself, over and over, that it was never vanquished, despite the festering sore of the Recent Unpleasantness.
An old guard culture, hostile to outsiders, was the downfall for a Jewish New Yorker in his early 30s, Leo Frank, who made a good living as a factory superintendent. He was accused and arrested of a gruesome child murder. Playwright Alfred Uhry, author of Driving Miss Daisy, wrote the book for the Broadway play, launched onstage in 1998. Uhry has family ties to the story, in true Southern storytelling style. There are no secrets down there, except the ones they choose to tell years later.
Parade is no picnic as it wends its way through the Southern justice system on a murder case that became a national cause, like the Davis case. Frank was found guilty of fatally strangling a girl worker in his pencil factory. When he was sentenced to hang, there was an outcry from quarters who felt a virulent strain of anti-Yankee anti-Semitism played a part in the verdict.
The governor of Georgia a century ago, John Slaton, went against the will of Atlanta’s townspeople. His character, portrayed by Stephen F. Schmidt, exhibits courage and pathos, clear about the consequences of bucking the establishment. Governor Slaton reviews the conflicting evidence in Frank’s case and grants him clemency: life imprisonment instead of death by the state’s hand. That is precisely what Georgia state officials refused to do for Troy Davis.
Lead actor Euan Morton telegraphs Frank’s desperate plight with impressive restraint. Jenny Fellner, the actress who plays his wife Lucille, sparkles onstage with her singing voice and her journey to loving her husband, locked up and alone, more than she ever did.
Relentlessly, the end closes in. A well-connected mob of white men break into the jail where Frank is held, to take him for a long night ride. It was a well-planned thing. In the show as in life, the hooded men string Frank up—as he prays in Hebrew—and hang him, with picture postcards to show for it all. Very nice.
So if you get to Marietta, ask them about the tree where Frank was hanged. Yes, Georgia has lots of colorful local history, and the fun part is trying to see where the past ends and the present begins. Both the Davis and Frank convictions were reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied relief or mercy in both cases. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous justice, scolded Georgia for what he called a form of “lynch law” in Frank’s trial. But he was a damn Yankee in the minority.
Tetreault and others chose this timely tale to inaugurate The Lincoln Legacy Project, an initiative to spark a national dialogue on overcoming violence based on hate or bigotry. Parade’s history lesson could not be more sobering. Early in the 20th century, lynchings of black men were at an all-time high in the Southern states (including Maryland.) This was a spur to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Ari Roth of Theater J, a partner in co-producing the play, notes Frank met the same fate as so many black men at the hands of mobs. Parade, Roth said, is a “galvanizing reminder of what can go wrong in our country when hate speech and raging angers aren’t tempered and set to rest.”
Amen. And let the conversation begin.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 26, 2011
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