GOP Rep. Joe Walsh: Obama Was Elected President Because He’s Black

Freshman Tea Party Republican Rep. Joe Walsh, the U.S. Congressman from Illinois who is best-known as a dead-beat dad, over the weekend told supporters at a town hall meeting that the primary reason President Obama was elected is because he is black.

“Again, let’s not overlook the fact, guys, guys and and gals, folks, he was a historic figure,” Walsh, who is 50, said. “He’s our first African American president. The country voted for him because of that. It made us feel good about himself [sic]. I’ve said it before — it helped that John McCain was about 142 years old. It helped that the economy was tanking. A lot of these things helped. But he never would have gotten there without his historic nature.”

Eric Dolan at The Raw Story notes:

It is not the first time Walsh has said that Obama’s electoral success was due to his race.

“Why was he elected? Again, it comes back to who he was. He was black, he was historic. And there’s nothing racist about this. It is what it is,” he said in 2011.

Scott Keyes at Think Progress adds:

To say that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama benefited from latent prejudices is absurd.

Yet Walsh is using this view to undermine the president’s legitimacy and argue that he was elected not on his merits, but because of his race. Earlier in the town hall, Walsh criticized Obama for not being able to “understand this stuff” (speaking about government spending) because “he was an accidental president.”

Still, Walsh isn’t the only one to espouse this worldview. A recent survey found that “white Americans feel they are more discriminated against than blacks.”

Walsh has taken President Obama to task over Israel, penning what could be called a factually-inaccurate op-ed in The Daily Caller, claiming the President was siding with Palestine, lying, and “not capable of achieving peace in the Middle East because he is not pro-Israel.”

Ironically but unsurprisingly, the so-called “pro-family” anti-gay hate group, Family Research Council, awarded Walsh, last year, a deadbeat dad Congressman, with a 100% “True Blue” rating. Walsh recently issued a statement that he and his ex-wife have fixed their financial disagreements.