After his speech to the NAACP today elicited several rounds of boos from the audience, Mitt Romney’s campaign staff insisted that he was, in fact, received very well.

Romney staffers told press that they were “pleasantly surprised by the positive reception.” Tara Wall, a policy adviser, even declared, “I think actually there was a lot more applause, he had a standing ovation at the end, there was a lot more applause than disagreement.”

Wall went on to praise Romney for “saying tough things,” arguing with reporters, “I’ll take three boos out of thunderous applause over and over again.”

ThinkProgress reporters found a somewhat different response; attendees called the speech “patronizing” and Romney’s Obamacare comments in particular “a serious misjudgment.”

Even Romney himself admitted to Fox Business that he “expected” the boos, but wanted to deliver the same message he does to everyone else.

The longest and loudest boos came when Romney promised to repeal Obamacare, which he called “a non-essential expensive program.” Watch it:

HOUSTON, Texas — Mitt Romney addressed the national convention of the NAACP Wednesday morning, the nation’s largest civil rights organization. He was cordially received by the audience, who greeted him with a standing ovation, but the tone changed quickly after the GOP presidential candidate began his remarks.

The crowd booed Romney when he called for the full repeal of Obamacare and audibly laughed when he suggested he would be a better president than Obama for the African-American community. Also notable was what was left unsaid. Romney failed to address voting rights, which is a major theme of this NAACP gathering.

ThinkProgress was on the scene and talked to some NAACP members after Romney’s speech to get their thoughts. James Waters said some of Romney’s comments were “patronizing,” while Joe Brown argued that Romney “made a serious misjudgment relating to the health care reform.” Allytra Perryman went even further: “I don’t think he has any way to even remotely relate to the everyday citizen, let alone African-American citizens.”

Watch it:

Mitt Romney is scheduled to speak at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) convention. He will purportedly focus solely on the economy, steering clear of addressing the controversial voter identification laws that the civil rights organization sees as “systematically suppressing voters of color, students and the elderly.” Indeed, Romney has previously backed the very efforts the NAACP opposes, saying, “I like Voter ID laws by the way… more of them,” ignoring the evidence that voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise African-Americans:

• A Center for American Progress investigation concluded that “these laws hinder voting rights in a manner not seen since the era of Jim Crow,” given that minorities (along the young and the poor) are more likely to be unable to acquire photo identification.
• Indeed, 25 percent of African-American voters lack the type of ID required to vote under these laws.
• Attorney General Eric Holder called the standard voter ID legislation “a new poll tax” after his Department of Justice found sufficient grounds under the Voting Rights Act to block ID laws in South Carolina and Texas due to their disproportionate impact on minority voters.
• Voter fraud, the problem Voter ID laws are ostensibly supposed to correct, is basically nonexistent. Even proponents of the legislation can’t point to any actual examples.
• Voter ID laws are occasionally justified in straightforwardly racist or partisan Republican terms.
• Romney may know all of this – he used to support an extraordinarily progressive approach to getting voters ID.

Civil rights leaders are already taking a hard look at Romney’s “abysmal” record on the issues as Governor of Massachusetts. One has to wonder whether he – or any other Republican – could hope to make inroads in the African-American community while supporting such blatant voter suppression tactics.