Mitt Goes Black

Mitt Romney just gave a speech to the NAACP, carried live on all three cable news networks. The speech was fine, and unsurprisingly not well-received -- mostly what we usually term "polite applause."

The clip you're going to see a lot of, however, is when the audience interrupts Romney with sustained boos, when he says he will repeal ObamaCare.

I'm obviously just speculating here, but I think it was intentional. That's the clip he wanted.

Winning black votes is not a strategic priority for the Romney campaign -- they have almost nothing to gain there. He's only going to increase his share of the black vote significantly if the economy goes real bad, and if that's the case he's going to win the election handily anyway.

But if we're being honest, there are some white, non-urban voters -- think the Pennsylvania Catholics who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries -- who might be a little more likely to vote for Romney if they see him getting booed by the NAACP.

Watch the clip and see what you think. First of all, he uses the term "ObamaCare," which was totally unnecessary -- he could have said Affordable Care Act. He wasn't trying to say anything substantive, at all, about health care; it was literally just a clause in a bit about reducing the size of government. He acted like he was rushing through it into the next sentence, but then stopped immediately to allow the boos to build up. And then he "ad-libbed" a response, which was a citation he's used on the stump before, of a poll of small business owners about the jobs effect of ObamaCare.

So, just speculation, but I think he went there just to generate that clip of them booing him.