Don't skip NAACP.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The Republican Party has been making an unusual effort to win the support of black voters in the upcoming presidential election. In a recent visit with The Register-Guard's editorial board, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie described touring black communities with boxing promoter Don King, something it's safe to assume no Republican leader has done before.

This outreach effort makes even more puzzling President Bush's decision last week to refuse to speak at the NAACP's annual convention for the fourth consecutive year. Unless he changes his mind, Bush will become be the first sitting president in eight decades not to do so.

At first, a White House spokesman insisted that Bush had a scheduling conflict, an excuse that was hard to believe, since the NAACP's convention, which opened Saturday in Philadelphia, lasts nearly a week.

A more credible explanation came later from presidential spokesman Scott McClellan, who said "the current leadership of the NAACP had certainly made some rather hostile political comment about the president over the past few years."

McClellan is right about that. The NAACP has repeatedly blasted Bush and his party, accusing them of racial divisiveness and failing to deliver on past promises. In a speech last month, Chairman Julian Bond said Bush hasn't lived up to his promises of compassionate conservatism, noting that black unemployment is higher than 10 percent, more than twice the rate among whites.

Bush's snub is not only unstatesmanlike, it's also bad politics. Bush received a less than 10 percent of the black vote in 2000. Ignoring the nation's largest and oldest civil rights organization won't help him increase that dismal number.

The president should reverse his decision before it's too late. He would also do well to reflect on his own words from a speech he gave as a candidate at the 2000 NAACP convention: "Our nation is harmed when we let our differences separate and divide us.''