Michael Pollak forwarded:
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
