Romney booed over pledge to end Obama healthcare policy

REPUBLICAN presidential candidate Mitt Romney was booed by an African-American crowd yesterday when he told them he would eliminate president Barack Obama’s signature policy achievement, the US healthcare overhaul.

Romney’s conservative message did not go down very well at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, America’s oldest civil rights organisation whose African-American members are among Mr Obama’s strongest supporters.

The reaction was not uniformly negative. Romney received a standing ovation at the end and there were numerous instances of applause throughout the speech. The crowd of hundreds in a half-filled ballroom had applauded politely until he got to the portion of his speech where he said if elected on 6 November, he would work to repeal and replace the healthcare plan.

“I’m going to eliminate every expensive, non-essential programme. That includes Obamacare,” Mr Romney said. Then the boos erupted.

Mr Romney seemed unsettled by the reaction.

He also drew boos when he said the Democratic president had promised to create more jobs, but “he will not, he cannot, and his record of the last four years proves it”.

And boos erupted once again when he said: “If I am president, job one for me will be creating jobs. I have no hidden agenda. If you want a president who will make things better in the African-American community, you are looking at him.”

While the US unemployment rate is 8.2 per cent, among blacks it is even higher at 14.4 per cent.

Mr Romney knew he was not speaking to people who would normally vote for him. Mr Obama, the first black US president, gets the support of about 90 per cent of African-­Americans.

“We don’t count anybody out, and we sure don’t make a habit of presuming anyone’s support,” he told them at the outset, citing his ability to attract voters from both sides in his race to win the governor’s chair in Massachusetts, an overwhelmingly Democratic state.

Still he hoped his economic message would break through, that his free market principles would trigger job growth that would lift the middle class in ways that Mr Obama has not been able to achieve.

“The opposition charges that I and people in my party are running for office to help the rich. Nonsense. The rich will do just fine whether I am elected or not.

“The president wants to make this a campaign about blaming the rich and I want to make this a campaign about helping the middle class in America,” he said.

Mr Romney has a history with civil rights issues. His father, George Romney, spoke out against segregation in the 1960s and as governor of Michigan toured his state’s inner cities as race riots hit Detroit and other urban areas across the country. He went on to lead the Housing and Urban Development Department, where he pushed for housing reforms to help blacks.