Surprise! Gov. Matt Blunt is invited to dinner! To speak!
This is pretty much the way City NAACP President Harold Crumpton dropped the news on his (declining) membership and supporters that the Republican incumbent governor had been invited to piggyback onto announced keynote speaker (Hilary O. Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington Bureau) at last Friday’s Freedom Fund awards dinner.
Apparently it wasn’t only Crumpton who was nervous about the appearance by the surprise guest. Blunt’s campaign faxed out the announcement just a few hours before the event was scheduled to begin. Blunt’s political operative James Harris and communications director Rich Chrismer also supplied an odd amount of detail that seemed bent on discouraging media coverage, namely that Blunt wouldn’t go on until late in the program (8:45 p.m.) and wouldn’t stay on mic for long. They may as well have added that he was contagious with the flu.
The NAACP is often at pains to demonstrate its non-partisan approach to politics, usually because it represents the concerns of African Americans, which typically are better represented by Democrats than by Republicans. In this case, however, the advantage went to the GOP, since Blunt’s challenger Attorney General Jeremiah “Jay” Nixon was not on the bill for the Freedom Fund dinner.
Reportedly, Nixon and blue-chip Democrat Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan were invited to the dinner at the last minute in a back-handed manner by Claude Brown, vice president of the City branch – and only after several branch insiders reminded him about the NAACP’s non-partisan, tax-exempt status. Carnahan made it, but Nixon already was scheduled on the other side of the state and couldn’t – or didn’t – drop everything to attend.