One Cheer for The View Hosts for Questioning Obama's Silly Racebaiting

As previously noted here at NewsBusters, while the predominantly liberal hosts of The View did generally coddle and flatter President Obama during his appearance on their show yesterday, they do deserve some credit for questioning at least one ridiculous thing he said when he claimed that he might lose the election due to his untraditional name.

In his appearance, Obama suggested that prejudice among some voters will make it more difficult for him to be re-elected. When asked how close he expected the November presidential election to be, Obama said: "When your name is Barack Obama, it's always tight." After one of the hosts noted that Obama's full name was "Barack Hussein Obama," the president repeated his full name twice, stressing his middle name and implying that it caused voters to vote against him.

To their credit, The View didn't let him get away with it - one of the hosts asked Obama, "Why do you say that now, after four years?" 

Obama then admitted the election would likely be close due to the economy.

While the liberal media has largely overlooked this bit of nasty race-baiting from Obama, AllahPundit at HotAir smartly lambasted Obama's assertion that he faced a tight election due to his name, with the headline "Man who won landslide in 2008: An election is bound to be tight when you have a name like mine," predicting that Obama would use the false claim that his name sparks a broad racist reaction in the electorate "to smear Romney supporters and undecideds who end up concluding that he’s been a crappy president, even though we have empirical proof that the name 'Barack Hussein Obama' will not in fact prevent someone from winning 365 electoral votes and several southern swing states."

Fact: Barack Hussein Obama has never had a close election. Not for the Illinois state senate, not for U.S. Senate and not for president.

Fact: More white voters voted for Obama for president in 2008 than voted for John Kerry in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000, the latter two very white candidates with very non-exotic names. Rather than turning off voters in 2008, Obama's funny name and skin color may have helped him attract white voters drawn to the possibility of helping make history by electing America's first black president.

While it's true that Obama got fewer white votes than did Republican John McCain, that's  no different from the last several presidential elections, in which the Republican candidate got more white votes than the Democrat - even in elections won by the Democrat.

There's a reason for that, of course. There are millions of voters called "Republicans" who won't vote for the Democrat no matter whether the Democrat is white, black or other.

It's Democrats who most white voters dislike, not black people. The 2012 election the election will be close because, three years into the Obama "economic recovery," 24 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or so discouraged that they stopped looking for work.