What has gotten Ms. Poller worked up is Mr. Bush's decision not to
address the 95th annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P. this year, making
him the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to meet with
the group during an entire term in office, N.A.A.C.P. officials said.
Disgusting...but...
NAACP vows big push to get out black vote
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
BY BRIAN DONOHUE
Star-Ledger Staff
PHILADELPHIA -- Calling the November presidential election the most important race in decades, leaders of the nation's largest civil rights organization are vowing an unprecedented three-pronged plan to register new voters, get them to the polls and make sure votes are counted accurately.
The focus on getting out the vote came as NAACP president Kweisi Mfume continued to criticize President Bush for his refusal to address the group's 95th annual convention.
"If he were willing to listen, he would hear our opinion of what it really means to be pro-family, why it's really important to save Social Security and why smaller classrooms for students and day care for working parents must be more than a song or dance or a 20-second sound bite," Mfume said.
With an estimated 8,000 attendees at the convention, the task of increasing black voter turnout and preventing a repeat of the 2000 recount controversies became a focus of nearly every gathering.
At a luncheon for legal professionals, lawyers were implored to take a vacation day on Election Day to work at the polls and to do pro bono work on voters' rights issues.
Down the hall, clergy and religious workers sharing a meal were urged to get their congregations to the polls.
At an afternoon voter registration seminar, a representative of Blockbuster Video offered several hundred volunteers the use of the chain's video rental stores to conduct voter registration drives.
"We will be there, at every polling place, in every battleground state, and every community we can get to," Mfume told a cheering crowd during the day's keynote address. "We will ride, drag, push, pull and carry every registered voter we can find along with us."
Bush's opponent, U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), will address the group Thursday.
After years of broadening its mission to issues like health care and Social Security, the recount controversies of the 2000 election and the current hotly contested race have brought voters' rights issues back to the forefront of the nation's largest and oldest civil right organization.
"This is the ballgame," Michael McFadden, NAACP director of voter empowerment, told a roomful of several hundred voter registration volunteers.
The urgency is fed by a pair of converging factors.
First is the leaders' opinions that Bush has been unresponsive to the NAACP on issues such as health care, judicial appointments and education.
That frustration is combined with the belief that with a close race shaping up, a strong turnout by African-American voters could sway the balance in favor of Kerry.
"The black vote can determine who goes to the White House in this election," said Jim Daniel, regional coordinator for the NAACP's voter empowerment program. "It's not a matter of 'Do we have the numbers,' it's a matter of 'Do they vote.'"
Republicans say Bush, who drew only 8 percent of the black vote in the 2000 election, has made an appeal to African-Americans a priority of his re-election campaign.
A spokesman for the Bush/ Cheney campaign said Bush intends to appeal to black voters.
"The current leadership of the NAACP has certainly made some hostile comments in recent years, but the president is going to fight for every vote, including those of African-Americans," said campaign spokesman Kevin Madden.
Madden said the Bush administration has "a record of accomplishment" on many issues of importance to black Americans. He cited increases in minority homeownership and in the number of investigations undertaken by the civil rights division.
"This is a president that has focused on growing the economy and creating more jobs so that everyone can benefit," Madden said.
White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the first black woman to hold the position and one of Bush's closest aides, also defended his civil rights record.
"I know that this is a president whose record is impeccable on civil rights, impeccable on the interests of African-Americans, and I'm quite comfortable with the decision he's taken," Rice said yesterday on CNN.
Daniel of the NAACP said his organization hopes to increase by 5 percent the number of new voters registered over its total for the 2000 campaign, when 2 million were registered. He also encouraged delegates to take active roles in monitoring elections on the local level, to ensure that voters are not turned away or prevented from voting.
"If voters have to cross a ditch to get to the polls, we need to fix that. If the machines aren't working, we need to fix that," he said.
There is the sense that getting only a few hundred more African- Americans to the polls in the 2000 election, especially in Florida, would have won the presidency for then-Democratic candidate Al Gore.
"We will have no more Floridas," Daniel told a cheering crowd at the afternoon voter empowerment session.
As a nonprofit organization, the NAACP is prohibited from actively campaigning or endorsing a particular candidate. And there was more on the agenda than getting out the vote.
But even on broader issues ranging from health care to gay marriage, speakers often found themselves launching de facto broadsides against administration policy.
Mfume railed against plans to privatize aspects of Social Security, called for more funding for AIDS treatment and an increase in the minimum wage.
Referring to a recent incident in which the state of Florida wrongly removed 2,000 felons from the lists of legal voters, Mfume criticized the war in Iraq: "The tragic irony is that while the president proclaims the goal of building democracy in Iraq, democratically eligible voters in America are being purged from the voting rolls and stripped of their constitutional rights. Before we say anything else about protecting democracy in Baghdad, let's make sure we protect democracy at home."
Mfume's comments were more measured than those in a speech the previous night by NAACP Chairman Julian Boyd, who called the consequences of Bush's re-election "almost too dire to bear." And he cautioned Democrats not to take the organization's support for granted. "Every Republican is not our enemy and every Democrat is not our friend," he said.
