Romney and the NAACP - NYTimes.com Good Morning, African-American voters. Good morning, Mr. Romney. I am here for an Im-por-tant Reason. I want to be President. The President is an Im-por-tant person. He is head of the United States of America. That's a slight exaggeration of the tone Mitt Romney took in his speech today before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but only slight. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee talked to the gathering as if he were writing on a blackboard for not-so-bright elementary schoolers using big, block capital letters. He spoke in a discordant kind of singsong tone with an uncomfortable smile frozen on his face. I wondered if he's been getting lessons from the Bushes, the masters of the inappropriate grin. The remarks he was making to voters who went nearly unanimously for Barack Obama in 2008 were stilted and awkward. If this was actually an appeal for their votes, someone on his staff needs to rethink his career in speech writing. "I believe that if you understood who I truly am in my heart, and if it were possible to fully communicate what I believe is in the real, enduring best interest of African-American families, you would vote for me for president," Mr. Romney said in one of the more baffling lines of his speech. Did he think African-American leaders are not paying attention to the campaign? Or merely that he's incapable of expressing himself? Mr. Romney's real problem isn't being heard - he has been heard, clearly. It's that people don't like what they hear. Sure, the audience applauded politely when he talked about nurturing free enterprise (a vacuous promise), and even more politely when he talked about means-testing Medicare (an easy promise, since Congress is unlikely to do it). The most sincere reaction was the sustained booing that erupted when Mr. Romney referred to the President's health-care reform program with the derisive term "Obamacare" and vowed to repeal it. I have no clue how such a platform is in the "real, enduring best interest of African-American families" - or any American families. Right-leaning commentators obligingly said after the speech that it was somehow courageous for Mr. Romney to appear before the N.A.A.C.P. I don't see any courage in it at all. It's not like he was risking alienating a supportive constituency. Talking to the NRA about reasonable and cautious gun control would be a courageous act for Mr. Romney. His supporters also called his speech a gesture of inclusiveness. I'm guessing that by the end of the day, they will have upgraded that to "divisiveness" by implying that the audience's response was tainted by racial undertones. Won't you be my constituent?