On Sunday's Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, as host Harris-Perry led a discussion of what the presidential candidates will need to do to appeal to white voters, panel member and CNBC contributor Keith Boykin asserted that Republicans have "carefully caricatured" the Democratic Party as the "party of black people," and suggested that Americans have been duped into believing that most federal tax dollars are spent to benefit black Americans. Boykin:
The Republican Party has not only caracatured the Democratic Party as the black party, but they've also described government as about black people. So when people think about government, they think about the caricature that Ronald Reagan constructed, the Cadillac-driving welfare queen.
He added:
And they don't realize that two-thirds of the federal budget goes to Medicare and Social Security and national defense and interest on the debt. The amount of money we spend on welfare programs is infinitesimally small for the budget, and the majority of it doesn't even go to black people. But they don't understand that.
Michael Tomasky of Newsweek soon argued that, while white voters are "voting against their own economic interests" in voting for Republicans, white voters instead "perceive their interests as being in a country with guns and without a black President."
Boykin soon jumped back in and added: "They're voting for their racial interests."
A transcript of the relevant portion of the segment can be found here.
