Romney’s Stand and the Left’s Destruction of the Black Community

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Front Page Magazine:

In choosing to address the NAACP national convention Wednesday, Mitt Romney reached out to an organization whose leaders and rank-and-file members alike will support, with virtual unanimity, President Obama’s reelection bid this November. Nonetheless, the audience greeted Romney respectfully when he first stepped to the podium. That tenuous respect, however, quickly dissipated when Romney began to talk about Obama. Murmurs of disapproval ran through the crowd when the Republican candidate asserted that the President had not fulfilled his promises while in office, and that Romney’s own policies were likely to help “families of any color more than the policies and leadership of President Obama.” But when Romney pledged to reduce government spending in part by eliminating “expensive, non-essential programs” such as “Obamacare,” he was met with loud, sustained boos. Following the speech, NAACP chairman Ben Jealous wasted no time in issuing a statement indicating that Romney’s agenda was not only “antithetical” to the NAACP’s interests, but also reflective of “his fundamental misunderstanding of the needs of many African Americans.” No matter that the “Obamacare” legislation, as a major stepping-stone toward the Left’s ultimate goal of a single-payer system, will propel the country in the direction of a healthcare model that has already led to colossal levels of inefficiency, fiscal waste, and human tragedy wherever it has been tried.

The disapproval of Ben Jealous and his fellow NAACP members was of course entirely predictable, for they reside near the far left of the political spectrum, where any pledge to curb or reverse the growth of government constitutes heresy. Romney’s theme touched a collective raw nerve among the NAACP faithful—analogous to an outsider telling a Catholic congregation that the trinity and the doctrine of transubstantiation will lead them only to a spiritual dead-end.

 

The Left’s track record of economic, social, and moral destruction is easily observable to anyone willing to look at it. But as far as that goes, modern-day leftists are akin to the 17th-century philosophers who, professing certitude that mountains and valleys could not possibly exist on the moon, famously refused to condescend, even for a moment, to look through Galileo’s newly developed telescope. Indeed, contemporary leftists are likewise wedded to a faith they cannot bear to see challenged in any way, lest the carefully crafted towers of their understanding suddenly be washed away like sandcastles on the shore. Thus they turn a blind eye to the legacy of chaos and suffering that big government has brought to mankind generally, and to African Americans in particular.

 

Consider, for instance, what the Left did to the black community by way of government-mandated policies regulating the mortgage-lending industry. In 1977, progressive Democrats in Congress engineered the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which required banks to make special efforts to lend to minority borrowers—particularly mortgagors—of meager to modest means. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration effectively placed the CRA on steroids, transforming it from an outreach program into a strict quota system that imposed oppressive penalties on banks which fell short of their quotas. With no recourse other than to drastically lower their standards and to issue multitudes of subprime loans to borrowers with weak credit credentials, banks embarked on a path of ill-conceived practices that would ultimately lead to the housing-market collapse of 2008.