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" (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...) &amp;quot;If you want a president who will make things better in the African-American community, you are looking at him.&amp;quot; Wow. Just, wow. Okay, give him credit. He showed up. All right, that&amp;#039;s enough. Willard Romney who, as much as it makes the editors of Politico nervous to hear anyone say it, really is more comfortable around white people, went to the NAACP convention in Houston on Wednesday morning and attempted to put the best face on, well, his face. He hammered into place all the usual boilerplate \u2014 airy generalities about charter schools and economic opportunity. He got booed when he mentioned the Affordable Care Act, a moment that I&amp;#039;m sure will be translated into a campaign ad about his intellectual fortitude that will run only in areas where there are a lot of white people with whom he can feel comfortable. He took a crack at using same-sex marriage as a wedge issue \u2014 &amp;quot;As president, I will promote strong families and I also will support traditional marriage&amp;quot; \u2014 even though the NAACP recently endorsed same-sex marriage. He also mentioned our old friend, the mitt-romney-naacp-speech-10555184Keystone XL pipeline.... First, I will take full advantage of our energy resources, and I will approve the Keystone pipeline from Canada. Low cost, plentiful coal, natural gas, oil, and renewables will bring over a million manufacturing jobs back to the United States. This latter figure is almost assuredly a lie. He really has become the most remarkable liar. Why he would bring this up in front of this particular audience, I have no idea. Maybe a page from another speech accidentally got collated into this one. He even mentioned at length that he once was elected governor of Massachusetts, which somehow rarely comes up when he&amp;#039;s talking to audiences in say, Gadsden, Alabama. &amp;quot;You all know something of my background, and maybe you&amp;#039;ve wondered how any Republican ever becomes governor of Massachusetts in the first place. Well, in a state with 11 percent Republican registration, you don&amp;#039;t get there by just talking to Republicans. We have to make our case to every voter. &amp;quot; (Brief Historical Interlude: When he was elected in 2006, Deval Patrick was the first Democratic governor that Massachusetts had had in 15 years. Of the 14 gubernatorial elections in my lifetime here in the Commonwealth [God save it!], Republicans have won seven of them, and another Republican, Jane Swift, ascended to the Corner Office when Paul Cellucci went off to become Ambassador to Canada in 2001. It is so unremarkable for Massachusetts to have a Republican for its governor that Romney had to defenestrate Swift, a fellow Republican, before he could win in 2002. It&amp;#039;s not exactly like Willard was elected Pope or something.) The problem Romney has, of course, is that the Republicans \u2014 and most of American conservatism \u2014 went the wrong way on civil rights in the 1960&amp;#039;s, which is why his father declined to back Barry Goldwater, the party&amp;#039;s presidential nominee in 1964, and that it has declined to come all the way back again. Right now, the party of which he is the putative nominee is doing all it can to suppress enough minority voters in places like Pennsylvania. It&amp;#039;s very strange to see Romney pitching himself to African Americans while his entire party is hip-deep in a campaign to make sure as few African Americans as possible get a chance to vote for anyone, let alone for Mitt Romney. This is something he might have mentioned in his speech in Houston, if he really wanted points for courage. Woody Allen said 80 percent of success is showing up, but it&amp;#039;s that other 20 percent that really counts. UPDATE -- And I just couldn&amp;#039;t close up shop today without noting that the booing seems to have knocked even more than a few screws loose on the Romneybot. &amp;quot;I spoke with a number of African-American leaders after the event and they said, you know, a lot of folks do not want to say they will not vote for President Obama but they are disappointed in his lack of policies to improve the schools,&amp;quot; Romney told Fox, according to a rush transcript.  Just the most singularly remarkable liar. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14845/mitt-romney-naacp-speech-10555184/?click=news>