If the delegates to the NAACP's national convention were to hold a mock presidential election, the outcome would not be very suspenseful: Clinton in a landslide.
Nonetheless, many delegates are upset that Bob Dole, the presumptive Republican nominee, turned down their invitation to speak Tuesday, the day before President Clinton is scheduled to address the organization's 87th annual convention.Some delegates say that Dole missed an opportunity to reach out to a small but growing number of African-American voters who feel the Democratic Party has taken the black vote for granted. It is a mistake, these delegates say, to assume that the black vote is monolithic.
This, after all, was the year that many Republicans tried to push Colin Powell into running for president.
"Dole assumed that the black vote was automatically going for Bill Clinton, and that's not a fair assumption for anybody to make," said Maurice Williams, a delegate from Memphis who voted for Tennessee's Republican governor in the last election.
"I'm not one of those people who votes for someone just because they're carrying a party's name," Williams said. "I'm very disappointed that he didn't come. I was looking forward to hearing what he had to say."
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the nation's oldest civil-rights group.
Talk of the two candidates dominated the convention Tuesday. Ronald Reagan and George Bush attended previous conventions, and Dole should have carried on the tradition, delegates said. Few here would argue that Dole has a realistic chance of winning more than a small fraction of the black vote. Polls consistently show that 80 percent to 90 percent of African-Americans vote Democratic.
If anything, support for the Democratic Party is probably even stronger in an old-line civil-rights organization like the NAACP. But several convention delegates said that if the Republicans ever want to win more African-American votes, they will have to reach out for them.
This was a chance for Dole to show that the Republican Party takes black voters seriously, said Mary Perry, an NAACP delegate who once was chairwoman of the Wake County, N.C., Democratic Party.
"He wants to be president of the United States. I would think that would be for all people, not just one group. He's telling us he doesn't want our vote. He's sending a message, and we're hearing it."
While black Republicans are a minority within a minority, Perry said, they do vote. "I think that in all fairness to them, he should have shown up."
But Perry herself is living proof that Dole might have had little to gain politically by attending the convention. She said she has never voted for a Republican and doubted she ever will - if Republicans don't change their message substantially.
And several delegates said that Clinton, who addressed the convention in 1992, is in an even stronger position with black voters than ever because the Republican Party is increasingly seen as a foe of affirmative action and minority voting districts.
The U.S. Supreme Court has dealt setbacks to minorities on both these issues this year.
In addition, they said, the GOP "Contract With America" legislative agenda has alienated many African-American voters because its call for a smaller federal government would mean cutbacks in social programs supported by many blacks.
"They are trying to roll back many of the gains that we have made," said Thomas Johnson, a delegate from Massachusetts.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)