Who’s Afraid of the NAACP

George Bush is, that's who.

George Bush is refusing an invitation to speak at the NAACP's annual convention.

First the story was scheduling conflicts.

Bush spoke at the 2000 NAACP convention in Baltimore when he was a candidate. But he has declined invitations to speak in each year of his presidency, the first president since Herbert Hoover not to attend an NAACP convention, John White, a spokesman for the group, said Wednesday.

The NAACP received a letter from the White House three weeks ago declining the invitation because of scheduling conflicts and thanking the [sic] it for understanding. It was signed by presidential scheduler Melissa Bennett.

(via Prometheus 6).

Then the story was George Bush didn't like it when NAACP Chairman Julian Bond spoke truth (P6) about Republican politics.

They preach racial neutrality and they practice racial division. They celebrate Dr. King and they misuse his message. Their idea of reparations is to give war criminal Jefferson Davis a pardon. Their idea of a pristine environment is a parking lot before the lines are painted in. Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and the confederate swastika flying side by side. Their idea of compassion is to ask the guest at the millionaire’s banquet if they want an extra helping or a second dessert. They’ve tried to patch the leaky economy and every other domestic problem with duct tape and plastic sheets. They’ve written a new constitution for Iraq and ignored the Constitution here at home. They draw their most rabid supporters from the Taliban-wing of American politics.

And now – now – now they want to write bigotry back into the Constitution. They want to make one group of Americans outsiders to our common heritage. They want to do what has never been done before, to amend the Constitution to create a group of second-class citizens. Our Constitution is the last hope of freedom, it cannot become a carrier of prejudice and ignorance.

(Speech [.doc ] at Campaign For America's Future Take Back America Conference Wednesday, June 2, 2004)

We all know about Free Speech Zones designed to protect George W from having any direct contact with protesters. He's tough enough to send troops to kill innocent civilians but not tough enough hear a few critical words from his detractors.

But that's not what this is really all about. Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP, asked Bush to change his mind

and promised that the Republican president would be treated with respect at the Philadelphia event this week even if many delegates oppose his politics.

A candidate who refuses to talk to any group risks losing votes in what is likely to be a tight presidential contest, Mfume said.

More than 12 million black people are registered to vote, according to the NAACP. Most are Democrats.

"I would ask the president to reconsider his unnecessarily harsh stance and to show America that he's bigger than that," he said.

Mfume, a former congressman from Maryland, said Bush was courteously received the last time he spoke to National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at its 2000 meeting in Baltimore.

I'm sure George Bush is scared to be in a room full of Black people who don't like him. But his cowardly refusal also has a clear purpose—to "reconfirm the Southern Strategy of making gestures that imply approval of racism" (Silver Rights). George Bush wants his racist base to hear him say he doesn't need or care about the African-American vote.

Bush can smugly imply affinity with his racist supporters because he knows that Florida's Jim Crow vote spoilage rate is typical of the nation as a whole.

[O]f the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.

Bush is confident that his Help (White) America Vote Act (HAVA) will help him up the number of African-Americans whose vote won't count in 2004.

It is about to get worse. The ill-named "Help America Vote Act," signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.

California decertified some of Diebold Corp.'s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But the known danger of black-box voting is that computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.

And once again, the history of computer-voting glitches has a decidedly racial bias. Florida's Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.

Going digital won't fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts.

In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote- spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing 1 million black voters' ballots.