When the National Urban League planned its 2007 annual convention in St. Louis, which opens next Wednesday, national president Marc Morial and his local counterpart, James Buford, planned two presidential candidate forums, one for each of the major political parties. Many of these presidential candidates received invitations as early as last November.
The national conference, in fact, will only feature a Democratic forum (on July 27 at America’s Center), and that is because no Republican candidate has yet accepted the Urban League’s invitation. The Urban League does not endorse candidates, but their conference is seen as less hostile to a Republican candidate. Even George W. Bush came to speak to the conference in 1999. He was the only Republican presidential candidate to do so, and he came again in 2003 and 2004. There are strong indications he will come again this year.
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, the only African American contending for a presidential nomination in 2008, was the first to accept the Urban League’s offer, followed within 12 hours by U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton and finally (after some playful hounding in this paper’s Political EYE column) by former senator John Edwards.
Michael Bloomberg (elected as mayor of New York City as a Republican), who is considering a run for president as an independent, also accepted an invitation to speak at the conference’s leadership luncheon on July 25.
Anyone with a basic understanding of politics understands that one candidate (in the Democrats’ case, Obama) accepting such an invitation creates a strong motive for his rivals to follow suit. A major factor in the Republican contenders’ decisions is the timing of the conference, which falls prior to the highly partisan primary season, rather than before the general election.
Given that the Urban League’s base is African-American, and blacks vote heavily Democratic, any Republican campaign strategist could make a convincing case that it would not be helpful to his or her candidate’s aspirations to accept the Urban League’s offer to address African-American concerns at this time. Indeed, strategists for Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson must have made this argument, if they even considered the Urban League’s offer at all.
Yet, it deserves stating and remembering that not one single Republican vying for the highest elected office in the land found it worthwhile to present his views before a potential audience of 10,000 black Americans in the largest city in a swing state. Factor in that Buford himself is a Republican, that the Urban League includes many business leaders on its board of directors and that the national conference numbers among its sponsors major contributors to the Republican Party, and then the Republican candidates’ firm refusal to attend a scheduled forum at the conference shows disdain that begins to verge on insult.
African Americans across the country who come to St. Louis for the Urban League annual conference – welcome, one and all! – and those who call St. Louis home would do well to remember which presidential candidates thought it worth their time to spend a day in our river city sharing their views on issues of special interest to Black America.