On the Sunday, July 15, Melissa Harris-Perry show, MSNBC host Harris-Perry went on a rant about Mitt Romney's speech to the NAACP as she accused the GOP presidential candidate of only attending the convention for the purpose using negative audience reaction as "red meat to feed to his base," making African-Americans as "props." She began:
This was the moment Mitt Romney got what he really came for, the soundbite of the black audience booing his line about cutting government spending and the Affordable Care Act, in particular. You see, Mitt Romney didn't come to the NAACP to break bread or extend an olive branch. He came for a morsel of red meat to feed to his base, and he served it up later that day when he spoke in front of a very different audience of donors at a fund-raiser in Montana.
Harris-Perry then read from Romney's speech at a GOP fund-raiser:
He told them, quote: "Your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this. If they want more stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy - more free stuff. But don't forget nothing is really free."
The MSNBC host suggested that Romney was referring to the NAACP audience, charging that he used them as "props." Harris-Perry:
Okay, Mitt Romney took an audience of Americans who he is running to serve and turned them into a prop. Now, it should go without saying, but African-Americans want to be treated like people, not props. We don't want to be the political equivalent of the character who dies first in the movies. We want to be Tyrese, the one black guy who managed not to get killed and survived through all three Transformer films.
She continued:
Black people want to be spoken to not as a burden on our struggling economy booing Obamacare because we want free stuff, but as hard-working taxpayers who boo the repeal of Obamacare because we don't want to carry the $56 billion cost of uncompensated care for the uninsured.
Black people want to be spoken to as friends and family members who boo the repeal of Obamacare because they'd rather not watch our loved ones choose between medical bankruptcy or death when they can't afford their medical expenses.
-- Brad Wilmouth is a news analyst at the Media Research Center