Yesterday, amid much ballyhoo, the NAACP released its “Report Highlighting Troubling Ties To Racist Groups In Tea Party Ranks,” according to a press release issued by the 111-year-old civil rights group.
Those expecting the NAACP to chide Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley for introducing race baiting into the state’s gubernatorial campaign will have to wait a bit longer. And I think we’re talking decades here.
“We are a nonpartisan, 501C3 at the national office so we can’t comment on elections this close to one,” a spokeswoman for the organization said.
Fair enough, but skeptics will note that there are several candidates running for the U.S. Senate who have the support of those in the Tea Party movement (there is no official “Tea Party”). Releasing a report about racist elements in the Tea Party movement only two weeks before Election Day is, many will note, indeed a comment, and a pro-Democratic comment at that.
You’d think NAACP officials sincerely concerned about “racist elements” and “racist ties” would want to make a statement saying that race baiting, in any campaign in any state of the union, is unacceptable. NAACP honchos had a chance to do that when O’Malley shamelessly tried to paint former Gov. Robert Ehrlich with the racist brush, but they passed.
To his credit, Ehrlich didn’t let it pass. Here’s his comment on O’Malley’s naked race baiting, which the former governor gave to several reporters Tuesday after talking to professor Richard Vatz’s class at Towson University:
“I’m not gonna put up with it,” Ehrlich said. “I don’t put up with it in my private life, and I’m not gonna put up with it in the campaign.”
Ehrlich then noted, correctly, that when O’Malley was mayor of Baltimore, he implemented a crime-fighting strategy that led to “mass arrests” of young black men in the city.
“That’s the last person I’m gonna put up with it from,” Ehrlich said.
And O’Malley is the last person running for any public office that should dare whip out the race card, much less play the darned thing. The people in the NAACP’s national office are the last ones who should pass on making a comment about O’Malley, race baiting and the disproportionate effect his anti-crime policies as Baltimore’s mayor had on young black men.
Indeed, if you visit the organization’s Web site, www.naacp.org, you’ll find these words: “The NAACP advocates for … an end to racial disparities at all levels of the system.”
You’ think an organization with such a mission would have called O’Malley on his anti-crime policies years ago, but that was when Julian Bond was the NAACP board chairman and focused his efforts on attacking then-President George W. Bush and making the civil rights organization little more than the hatchet wing of the Democratic National Committee.
(To its credit, the Baltimore branch of the NAACP filed a lawsuit challenging those mass arrests. The lawsuit was settled with the city of Baltimore having to pay $870,000, a clear rebuke of O’Malley’s policies.)
Instead, we have the NAACP national organization obsessing over Tea Party movement advocates like Roan Garcia-Quintana, Karen Pack, Peter Gemma, Clayton R. Douglas, Larry Pratt and Billy Roper, who are all mentioned in the NAACP report. Not one of those is a household name, and not one of those persons holds elected office or affects public policy.
The man who does hold elected office, and whose policies as Baltimore mayor had a disastrous effect on young black men, and who shamelessly race baited, warrants nary a rebuke from the NAACP.
Maybe NAACP president and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous can tell us why.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
