US president Barack Obama has denied former president Jimmy Carter's charge that racism was a leading factor in angry criticism of his healthcare agenda.
"Are there people out there who don't like me because of race? I'm sure there are. That's not the overriding issue here," Mr Obama told CNN as he weighed in on a controversy that has simmered since the former president injected charges of racism into the US healthcare debate this week.
"I think there are people who are anti-government," Mr Obama said in one of a series of television interviews last night. "I think there's been a long-standing debate in this country that is usually that much more fierce during times of transition or when presidents are trying to bring about big changes."
Mr Carter raised the point after South Carolina Republican Representative Joe Wilson shouted "You lie" at president Obama during a healthcare reform speech in Congress last week and thousands of conservatives rallied in opposition to Mr Obama at demonstrations in Washington.
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," Mr Carter told NBC News.
President Obama made clear he disagreed with Mr Carter, a fellow Democrat. The president is caught up in a fight to reclaim lost ground from critics of his effort to overhaul the US healthcare system, his top domestic priority.
"I think that race is such a volatile issue in this society, always has been, that it becomes hard for people to separate out race being sort of a part of the backdrop of American society, versus race being a predominant factor in any given debate," he told ABC News.
While acknowledging some of the animosity he faces is due to racism, he said there was a flip side. "Are there some people who vote for me only because of my race? They're probably some of those, too," he said.
As for some of the caustic rhetoric that has bubbled up at conservative protests, Mr Obama told CNN: "The things that were said about FDR (Franklin Roosevelt) were pretty similar to the things that were said about me - that he was a communist, he was a socialist."
"Things that were said about Ronald Reagan when he was trying to reverse some of the New Deal programs were pretty vicious as well," Mr Obama added.
President Obama told ABC that most Americans were just trying to figure out how proposed healthcare changes would affect them but that concern about big government was "probably the biggest driver of vitriol right now."
Mr Obama had mostly steered clear of the issue of race in the weeks since he injected himself into a fierce debate in Massachusetts after black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested at his own home on suspicion of breaking into it.
After the president created an uproar by saying that Cambridge police had acted stupidly in the case, he later expressed regret for the tone of his remarks and had the professor and police officer to the White House for a beer in what was dubbed a "beer summit."
Reuters