Why don’t some people love Barack Obama as President? Well, it could be his incoherent foreign policy. They may not like his demand for expanded federal spending, or the fact that he’s used executive branch agencies to conduct end-runs around Congressional oversight. Some may oppose Obama’s economic policies, while others may believe that Obama isn’t doing the job as Commander-in-Chief to their liking. The massive ObamaCare plan and the opaque manner in which his allies enacted it in Congress certainly turned off a whole lot of people, and there are some who oppose him for his connections to Planned Parenthood, ACORN, and radicals like William Ayers, Bernadette Dohrn, and Jeremiah Wright.

In other words, after more than two years in the Oval Office, Obama has given people plenty to dislike. But according to Obama, there’s only one reason why anyone would oppose him:

In May 2010, he told guests at a private White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing activists in the anti-incumbent “Tea Party” movement that was then surging across the country. Many middle-class and working-class whites felt aggrieved and resentful that the federal government was helping other groups, including bankers, automakers, irresponsible people who had defaulted on their mortgages, and the poor, but wasn’t helping them nearly enough, he said.

A guest suggested that when Tea Party activists said they wanted to “take back” their country, their real motivation was to stir up anger and anxiety at having a black president, and Obama didn’t dispute the idea. He agreed that there was a “subterranean agenda” in the anti-Obama movement–a racially biased one–that was unfortunate. But he sadly conceded that there was little he could do about it.

Are there people who don’t like him because of his ethnicity? I’m sure there are, just as there are some people who refuse to criticize him for the same reason. But to claim that the phrase “take back [the] country” somehow reflects racism is to wake up and believe history started in 2009. Stacy McCain points out that Obama himself spoke at conferences titled “Take Back America” in 2006 and 2007, sponsored by liberal activist group Campaign for America’s Future, which has connections to the Tides Foundation and the Apollo Alliance, and that leads to …

So Obama spoke at the “Take Back America” conference, sponsored by a sister organization of the think tank that co-sponsored the Apollo Alliance, whose board member Van Jones was appointed as “green jobs czar” by Obama, who subsequently declared it was racist to want to “Take Back America.”

Maybe Obama should take back that accusation.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!