During his speech before the NAACP on Wednesday in Houston, Mitt Romney received a smattering of boos from the audience when he promised to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care reform law.
According to MSNBC host Al Sharpton, the Republican presidential candidate wanted to get booed.
On MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation” a few hours after the speech, Sharpton said the former Massachusetts governor desperately wanted to show he wasn’t a flip-flopper.
“He had a hard audience for him,” Sharpton said. “But I think that what was interesting to me is, I think it was calculated, Tamron, that he was going to attack the president’s Affordable Health Care Act, call it ‘Obamacare’ and expect that he would get some kind of displeasure from the audience.”
Sharpton said Romney intentionally instigated attendees so that he would “be able to be play to the right-wing and to his conservative base” and say, “I went in and stood up and that I’m not a waffler — not one that goes from one side to the other. I stood up where I knew it wasn’t going to be popular.”
Sharpton added, “I don’t think that he went to the NAACP to get support.”
“When you hear him lay out his policy, how on the one hand do you say that I’m the best candidate for the African-American community and clearly as a disproportionate amount of unemployment and need and then you say but I’m going to cut all social programs, I’m going to preserve tax cuts for the wealthy, I’m declaring war on the middle class in many ways because he’s not going to support President Obama’s proposal of tax cuts for the middle class while they still deal with whether we have tax cuts for the rich,” Sharpton said. “So, I’m going to tell you I’m going to be good in my rhetoric, but the results of my program would only intensify the problems in the African-American community.”