How about RonmeyCare? 
I am fairly certain that candidates for the presidency are looking to create news images and soundbites that are striking and appealing to their constituency–and Romney being booed by black people after saying something derogatory about “Obamacare” is certainly an image and soundbite strking and appealing to his constituency.
And they also want to appeal to more voters, not just the ones they already have. I don’t think Romney achieved that when he was repeatedly booed by members of the biggest civil rights organization in the country.
Obama was also a better candidate than Gore or Kerry. He got more black votes and more votes in general.
Black voters have been voting for white candidates for generations and they’ve been voting overwhelmingly Democrat for decades, but when they prefer a black Democrat to a white Republican or don’t like Mitt Romney’s policies, they’re racist. Somebody explain this to me, please.
I don’t know. I guess I’m with BobLibDem and Frylock on this one. It certainly seemed to me that Romney was signalling to the base of the Republican party. I believe he was counting on the negative reaction to the Obamacare comment.
Black people aren’t going to vote for Romney anyway, and he knows it, so I can see a calculation to exploit their reaction to shore up the extreme element of his party’s base who are not exactly in love with him.
Right, because we’ll be seeing this soundbite/image over and over again. :dubious:
It’s easy to get stuck in the 24-hour news cycle and think whatever the story du jour is matters so much more than it actually does.
He’s been pandering to those voters for months. What difference does falling on his face in front of the NAACP make?
Because he wasn’t just speaking to voters, but to the NAACP which, although past its prime and of much less significance to the average black person today than, say, 30 years ago, is still a symbol of black representation and identity to some, and a target of derision for an element of the Republican party with a growing voice. I can’t tell you how many times I heard the word ‘brave’ to describe Romney and his comment about Obamacare since yesterday. It’s not so much what he said that is striking chords, but that he said it to this specific audience.
I also don’t agree that he fell on his face. As I said, I think it was calculated, and I think he achieved the expected results. He’s campaigning for the hard right voter, who is not as enamored with Romney as he needs them to be. This helped him.
If that were true, he’d be doing a great job of appealing to people who were already going to vote for him and continuing to alienate everybody else.
I think he’s having a hard time shifting his mind-set from the primary season where the right answer to every question was the far right answer. He worked so hard to try to build up his conservative credentials that he can’t help himself but to continually pander to them.
Seriously, does Romney not know that “Obamacare” is a pejorative? The more I think about it, the more I think he came to ruffle feathers, not smooth them. It didn’t take him long to channel his inner Reagan and declare that if you want “free stuff” from the government, Obama’s your man. It seems if you believe that Romney came there sincerely, you have to simultaneously believe that Romney is seeking the black vote while at the same time applauding efforts to suppress it.
I guess we can look forward to future appearances at Liberty University and Philadelphia, MS.
He knows. That’s why he used it.
It’s not that; it’s the same structural problem McCain had. He had to do a lot of work to appeal to far-right voters because they had a lot of concerns about his record, and now he has problems because he’s bound by that rhetoric and because those voters are on the lookout for signs he might not keep his promises. All of that makes it hard to appeal to more moderate voters.
It started life as a pejorative, which certainly didn’t help him there. But then again it’s become pretty mainstream at this point.
Before a different audience, right? That was deeply insincere, particularly given, you know, the whole Romneycare thing for starters.
If i’m not mistaken he was booed when he said he would “repeal Obamacare.” What was he supposed to say “I won’t repeal Obamacare.” I don’t think even he could pull that one off. I guess he could have went through the whole speech without mentioning Obamacare, but that would have been even more strange.
He could have referred to it as the Affordable Care Act, and then give his alternative.
That was one of the times, yes.
He could’ve talked about other issues and focused on jobs, for example. He faces a huge uphill battle with black voters regardless, but the confrontational attitude clearly did not work.
He’d have to have an alternative.
It was a win-win for Romney. If he got booed (the way the smart money was bet), then he’d get a prize to show to his core constitutients. If by some miracle he didn’t get booed (owing probably to the discipline of the audience, who could have determined not to give him the booing he was asking for) then he could have (lamely) argued that even in the black community Obama was less popular than he’d thought–“See how nice Obama’s core was to me?”
Would you say it’s the break the [del]McCain[/del] Romney campaign has been waiting for? 
What I’m thinking isn’t that this was calculated to persuade anyone to vote for Romney who might otherwise have voted for Obama, rather, it’s calculated to cause people to vote for Romney who might otherwise not have voted at all, or who might have voted for a Constitutional Party candidate or some other hard-right third party.
As I remember from many health care discussions the evidence I have seen is that a huge number of new jobs are prevented in the current environment as many would be entrepreneurs calculate the big costs in health care that they and any future employees will typically encounter if they start a business. (Small business usually have this disadvantage against big business, big business can get better deals from health care providers just by their big pool of workers) This is specially so if there is a family member that already has a previous condition, the would be entrepreneur then decides to stay in the big corporation that gives him or her a better deal.
What I say here is that Romney and the republicans still have just a very narrow view about what the current irrational health care that we have does to the big job picture.
Related to the jobs issue and health care, there is also another elephant in the room, according to the latest surveys 20% of the black population in the USA has no health insurance, in a related demographic, the number of Hispanics is around 25% or more with no health insurance or an inadequate one. As many voters in those groups are in that situation or do know a relative with no insurance and the problems that brings, I do think that health care reform is one big issue that will lead to the defeat of Romney in places like Florida.