Mfume might be glad to go, but the NAACP will miss him

Gregory Kane looks at the Mfume resignation from the NAACP. Kane correctly says too bad that Bond isn't the one to go vice Mfume.//JW sends.

Mfume called it quits yesterday after nearly nine years of leading the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His last day will be Jan. 1. He leaves behind, Mfume told reporters, an organization that has a budget surplus and some $15 million in cash reserves. That's quite a change from the NAACP that Mfume took over, which was, in his words, "mired in debt and steeped in doubt."
For some news media representatives present, the NAACP is still "steeped in doubt." It's not because the organization is in the red financially. The cloud that now hovers over the NAACP concerns the organization's nonpartisanship - or allegations that there's a lack of it - and a subsequent Internal Revenue Service audit ordered by the Bush administration. One reporter asked if Mfume and NAACP board Chairman Julian Bond - who sat with four other board members to Mfume's left as the departing president delivered his farewell remarks - had allowed the organization to become too partisan. "I don't think so," answered Bond, whose speech at the NAACP's annual convention in Philadelphia this year inspired the audit. "I don't think there was anything in my remarks in Philadelphia that crossed the line. If criticizing the president warranted an IRS audit, 55 million Americans would now be under audit."
That sounds like the same ducking, bobbing, weaving and slipping of punches about NAACP "nonpartisanship" that Bond and other organization leaders have done for years. Unfortunately, it's the kind of ducking, bobbing, weaving and slipping of punches more akin to that done by Chuck "The Bayonne Bleeder" Wepner than Muhammad Ali.