The Washington Post reports:

President Bush and outgoing NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume met at the White House yesterday in what Mfume described as a frank, “man-to-man” discussion aimed at fixing the broken relationship between the president and the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. . . . Last summer, Bush pointedly declined an invitation to address the organization’s national convention for the fourth consecutive year, calling his relationship with the group “basically nonexistent.”

Why did Bush have problems with the NAACP? There is a hint later in the story:

Julian Bond, the NAACP’s board chairman, issued a statement saying he welcomed the discussion. Bond previously has been sharply critical of Bush and many Republicans — who he once said “draw their most rabid supporters from the Taliban wing of American politics. ” Earlier this year, the IRS launched an investigation into whether those remarks by Bond violated the NAACP’s tax-exempt status.

I doubt the IRS is going to take any action against a sacred cow like the NAACP — but if they were serious about their investigation, they might want to look at some other comments made by Bond, which I told you about last year. An AP story reported in July 2003:

The leader of the NAACP [Julian Bond] criticized President Bush and his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, for challenging race-conscious admissions in colleges and vowed to work to unseat the president in 2004 . . . [Bond] also said the group intended “to uproot the bigger ‘Bush’ in 2004.”

As I have previously argued, those comments were a clear violation of IRS regulations preventing tax-exempt organizations like the NAACP from engaging in “political activities” — a term that expressly encompasses “activities that encourage people to vote for or against a particular candidate, even on the basis of non-partisan criteria.”

Given the organization’s history of hostility to Bush, it’s no surprise that he refused to meet with any of the group’s representatives until now. After all, meeting with them in the 2000 election didn’t do him much good. Two months later, a (non-tax-exempt) arm of the “non-partisan” NAACP ran an advertisement carrying the NAACP logo which unfairly linked Bush to the racially motivated dragging death of a black man in Jasper, Texas.

Now that Bush has been elected, the subtext of his meeting with Mfume was this: I won, and there’s nothing you or the NAACP can do about it. If the group wants to build a relationship with this president or any other Republican, it could start by ceasing its blatant campaigning against any Republican who happens to run for the presidency.