President Obama thinks some people don’t like him because of his race.
“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in the magazine’s Jan. 27 issue.
“Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President,” he added.
The article noted that Obama lost white voters in 2012 by history’s largest margin for a winning presidential candidate, and that his plunge in the polls last year – which many pundits declared the worst year of his presidency — was steepest among whites.
Some observers immediately mocked Obama for suggesting that race — and not his policies — is the reason for his dismal numbers.
“I’m fine with losing my job, losing insurance, being audited. I just can’t stand that he’s black,” @OrwellForce snarked on Twitter, cramming the weak economy, Obamacare and the IRS’s scrutiny of political nonprofits into one tweet.
Obama conceded that his party has sometimes appeared to shrug off “the concerns of middle- and working-class folks, black or white.”
“And this was one of the great gifts of Bill Clinton to the Party—to say, you know what, it’s entirely legitimate for folks to be concerned about getting mugged, and you can’t just talk about police abuse,” he told The New Yorker.
“How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes? It’s all fine and good for you to want to do something about poverty, but if the only mechanism you have is raising taxes on folks who are already feeling strapped, then maybe you need to widen your lens a little bit. And I think that the Democratic Party is better for it.”