By Holly Bailey 

John McCain often likes to say he prefers the challenge of going before an audience that’s skeptical of his message. If that’s really true, today is his day. This morning, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee will do what not many Republicans have done before. He’ll speak before the national NAACP convention in Ohio. His goal: To convince the group’s members that he’ll be a better president than Barack Obama, the nation’s first African-American nominee for the White House. In other words, good luck. But McCain hopes he’ll get credit for at least showing up for the convention—an appearance he and most of the other GOP presidential hopefuls (except for Tom Tancredo) ducked last year. According to speech excerpts released by his campaign this morning, McCain asks members to “excuse” him for last year’s slight, explaining that his campaign was in the middle of an “implosion.”

While we’ll have to wait until later this morning to see the full extent of McCain’s speech, what’s notable about the excerpts is that it seems McCain will focus less on the idea of convincing the members that he’ll be “president for all the people”—a phrase he often used during his tour last spring of what his campaign described as “forgotten places” of the country, including Alabama’s Black Belt. McCain opened that tour by speaking in the shadow of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where white police officers beat black civil rights marchers as they tried to make their historic walk to Montgomery in 1965, where he praised the courage of the marchers and vowed to work for people and cities that had been “ignored…by the sins of indifference and injustice, or have been left behind as the world grew smaller and more economically independent.”

According to the excerpts, McCain will talk about the civil rights movement, but he’ll also focus more on an area of possible agreement: education reform. It’s a subject that McCain doesn’t often talk about, at least not specifically. According to excerpts of today’s remarks released this morning by his campaign, McCain will liken the struggle to reform education to the other “challenges that African Americans have met and overcome”, saying the “problems require clarity of purpose” and a break from “tired rhetoric.” “They also require a willingness to break from conventional thinking,” McCain will say, according to the campaign. “After decades of hearing the same big promises from the public education establishment, and seeing the same poor results, it is surely time to shake off old ways and to demand new reforms.” What kind of reforms? We’ll have to wait and see exactly what McCain proposes, but the money line of his excerpts lists three areas of focus: “If I am elected president, school choice for all who want it, an expansion of Opportunity Scholarships, and alternative certification for teachers will all be part of a serious agenda of education reform,” McCain will say.

Will it be enough for McCain to win votes today? Probably not. But McCain still tries: “As much as any other group in America, the NAACP has been at the center of that great and honorable cause.  I’m here today as an admirer and a fellow American, an association that means more to me than any other,” he will say. “I am a candidate for president who seeks your vote and hopes to earn it.   But whether or not I win your support, I need your goodwill and counsel.  And should I succeed, I’ll need it all the more.  I have always believed in this country, in a good America, a great America.  But I have always known we can build a better America, where no place or person is left without hope or opportunity by the sins of injustice or indifference.  It would be among the great privileges of my life to work with you in that cause.”