There’s no time for grown-ups
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Campaign politics is all about pandering. You can’t
expect a candidate to show up to talk anything but
drivel when his survival is on the line.
But
not always. Mitt Romney showed up this week in
Houston to speak to the annual convention of the
National Association of Colored People. Some people
thought he was brave, others that he was merely
foolish, and was wasting his time.
The
stage was set for a Republican calamity. Earlier in
the week, Atty. Gen. Eric Holder delivered a
race-baiting speech that would have done a
Demoractic pol in the Old South proud. He put the
crowd surging into the aisles, howling their
appreciation. He defended the Justice Department
efforts to block laws in more than 30 states to
require voters to show some sort of identification
before getting a ballot. “The arc of American
history has always moved toward expanding the
electorate. It is what has made this nation
exceptional.” More rafter-raising cheers from the
delegates (who were required, by the way, to show ID
to get into the hall).
The
attorney general likened voter-identification
requirements, enacted to prevent unqualified voters
from stuffing ballot boxes with illegal votes, to
the Jim Crow-era requirement in most Southern states
to pay a poll tax (usually a dollar) to cast a
ballot. Mr. Holder, a lawyer, was clearly basing his
comparison on hearsay evidence. Voter-ID is required
in many states a long way from Dixie, and it’s
nothing like a poll tax. The usual forms of
identification – a driver’s license, an employer’s
identification – is all that is required in states
with voter-ID laws, and, as in Texas, where the
Justice Department is at the moment in court
attacking the requirement, the states provide, free,
an identification card. If the right to vote is, as
the attorney general says, a citizen’s “most
precious right,” it ought to be precious enough to
take the trouble to get free and proper
identification. Anyone who wants to drive a car,
cash a check or buy a bottle of beer has to be
prepared to go to such trouble.
Mitt
Romney obviously knew he wouldn’t raise the rafters
with anything approximating cheers, but showed up,
anyway, to do what politicians, editorial writers
and civics teachers say we all should do – address
respectful arguments to those who disagree with us.
Didn’t someone say that’s the American way? He paid
the crowd the compliment of addressing them as
grown-ups in a speech that was direct, assertive and
dispassionate. He told them that he, not Barack
Obama, was really the one they have been waiting
for.
“If
you want a president who will make things better in
the African American community, you are looking at
him.” No cheers, but when the scattered booing
subsided, he said: “You take a look.”
He
repeated his promise to repeal Obamacare, citing its
threat to the economy and taking note of the 14
percent black unemployment rate, using the shorthand
nearly everyone uses to describe the Affordable Care
Act. He appeared surprised by some of the boos that
rained down on him. He would learn later, from
pundits, bloggers and other busybodies on the left,
that the term “Obamacare” is racist. No one
explained how and why that could be.
Right
on cue, Nancy Pelosi, fresh from Barney Frank’s
wedding reception where she scandalized the guests
by dancing with . . . a man, accused Mitt Romney of
arranging the derision and contempt he got in
Houston. “I think it was a calculated move on his
part to get booed at the NAACP convention.”
Others in the media chorus quickly picked up the
theme. Lawrence O’Donnell of cable-channel MSNBC
called the Romney speech part of a “Southern
strategy” to appeal to “racial and racist voting.”
One of the O’Donnell guests accused Mr. Romney of
being “culturally ignorant” for describing a black
colleague as having served in his “kitchen cabinet,”
or inner circle of advisers, when he was the
governor of Massachusetts. “To talk about being in
the kitchen and not talk about an African-American
actually being in your cabinet is really not a good
metaphor to use with African-Americans.”
Vice
President Joe Biden, who once boasted to a Virginia
audience that Delaware was a slave state, too,
arrived just before closing time in Houston, and, as
if auditioning for a post-Obama job as a stand-up
comic, told a packed house of delegates successfully
disguised as empty seats that all their fears would
come true if they didn’t vote for Barack Obama.
The
president campaigned in 2008 as the post-racial
candidate. But that was a long, long time ago.