In the wake of Jesse Jackson's slashing remark about Barack Obama's emphasis on parental responsibility, John McCain is telling the NAACP who is really hurting African-American children--the "entrenched bureaucracy" and unions that want to deny them the right to hand over tuition to private schools in addition to the taxes they pay for "failing" public education.
In McCain's alternate universe, the answer to a good start in life for children of families threatened by rampant inflation and home foreclosures is to find the money to buy something they have every right to expect government to provide.
-- ROBERT STEIN
I think McCain legitimately deserves some credit for going into the NAACP, not the most friendly of venues ever for the GOP, particularly not a hotbed of support this year given the circumstances, and giving a pretty gracious and magnanimous speech.
-- JOHN COLE
The black vote in every election since Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory over Goldwater in 1964 has not been in play for any GOP presidential candidate. That's because, with the arguable exception of Bush in 2004, they haven't done anything to get it. McCain says this time he will. He won't shake their massive support for Obama, but he doesn't have to. He just needs a few more black votes in the right places to make the difference. The NAACP convention was one of those places.
McCain, who has received an F grade from the NAACP for his votes in each of the past four Congresses, acknowledged that he might not win the votes of the group's members in his race against Sen. Barack Obama McCain skipped the NAACP's convention last year -- he apologized for that today, saying he "was a bit distracted at the time dealing with what reporters uncharitably described as an implosion in my campaign" -- and in 1996 he advised then-GOP Sen. Robert J. Dole of Kansas not to attend it on the grounds that he would face a hostile audience. Today, accompanied by Maryland's former lieutenant governor Michael Steele, who is African American, McCain said he would seek the organization's support for his presidential bid.
Americans are witnessing the first presidential campaign in their history in which a major-party candidate is black.
But however historic this election is -- and whoever wins in November -- the nation remains deeply polarized on questions of race, according to a new poll by CBS and The New York Times.
The Times, in reporting the findings, said black and white Americans continue to hold "vastly different views of . . . Obama, the state of race relations and how black Americans are treated by society"
-- BRUCE TOMASO
I get regular e-mails exhorting me to remind readers that Republicans pushed the 13th Amendment into being, which is both true and utterly irrelevant. The Republicans need to sell conservative policies as real solutions, not point to an army of dead Democrats as a reason to support the GOP. Black voters, like all American voters, are interested in policy and how it addresses their needs. McCain has made that argument, and even though Barack Obama will win well over 90% of their votes, McCain has started a real dialogue based on the present and future, not on the past.
-- ED MORRISSEY
Photograph by The Associated Press
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