HOUSTON – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will tell the NAACP today that he believes the policies he would enact if elected in November would help black families.
Romney’s address to the nation’s most prestigious civil rights organization will acknowledge “barriers” and inequalities ” for people of color, despite the fact that the nation elected its first black president in 2008.
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“In some ways, the challenges are even more complicated than before,” Romney will say, according to excerpts provided to the Washington Examiner.
Romney will try to unify the discontent under the banner of his plan to fix the troubled economy.
“If equal opportunity in America were an accomplished fact, then a chronically bad economy would be equally bad for everyone,” Romney will tell the convention. “Instead, it’s worse for African Americans in almost every way.”
Romney is not expected to win very many African American votes. In 2008, 95 percent of black voters who went to the polls chose President Obama.
But Romney will attempt to appeal to the NAACP with the kind of reforms they support, such as school choice, which Democrats as a whole have blocked in part because of the powerful teachers unions.
Romney will tell the group about his plan to allow children to use federal education funds at any school.
“When it comes to education reform, candidates cannot have it both ways,” Romney will say, referring to the Democratic opposition to such a plan. “Talking up education reform, while indulging the same groups that are blocking reform. You can be the voice of disadvantaged public-school students, or you can be the protector of special interests like the teachers unions, but you can’t be both.”
