Former Fox News co-host: Obama 'bigoted' for suggesting his name makes winning harder

Fox News contributor Monica Crowley on Wednesday called the president of the United States "bigoted" for his suggestion that a name like "Barack Hussein Obama" made winning elections more challenging.

In an interview that aired on Tuesday, The View co-host Sherri Shepherd asked Obama how close his re-election would be.

"When your name is Barack Obama, it's always tight," the president replied, adding that his middle name was "Hussein."

Conservative websites like Hot Air immediately accused the current White House resident of trying to "smear" presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's supporters as racist.

Fox News host Megyn Kelly on Wednesday said she felt the need to cover the story because "the blogs are going off on this" and asked Monica Crowley, a Fox News contributor and former co-host of "The Five," to respond.

"It's not fair!" Crowley said of the president's comments. "What he meant was, I'm going to have a tough time because I have this funny name -- this is the line he used in 2008 -- because of my race, because of my ethnicity, because of my name. This is a man who won in 2008 with 53 percent of the vote. It was not a tight election."

"And to suggest the American people are somehow opposing him because of his race or his name is insulting to the American people and, quite frankly, Megyn, I think, bigoted in its own right."

Liberal Fox News contributor Sally Kohn argued that it was "accurate" that some voters would judge Obama on his race.

"I don't think that pointing that out makes you bigoted, I think it makes you realistic," Kohn explained. "Over one in three Republican voters still believe he wasn't born in the United States of America. If Hillary Clinton were our president right now, I think it would be disingenuous -- bordering on naïve of us -- to suggest that one of the ways in which she's being judged would be her gender. Of course it would be."

"He was the same color back in 2008 as he is now and we still had the majority of Americans put him into office," Kelly squinted. "Has his race suddenly become a deal breaker?"

"It's not even a deal breaker, it's a factor," Kohn pointed out.

"It's one thing for you to be able to sit with us and you make that point," Crowley insisted. "It's another thing for the president of the United States to make this point on national television. He's supposed to be the president of all of the American people: black, white, any race, any gender. And he's spent so much of his time, Megyn, dividing us, whether it is on class or race or gender. So for him to inject this where it doesn't exist tells me that he is so desperate to change the subject from his record that he's made up a GOP war on women, he talking about student loans, he's doing gay marriage."

"We get it because we're women, he get's it because he's black, Elizabeth Warren gets it because she's a Native American," Kelly jabbed, referring to attacks on Warren, a Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts, over reports that she may have claimed to have Native American heritage.

Watch this video from Fox News' America Live, broadcast May 16, 2012.

(h/t: Media Matters)

UPDATE: Despite Crowley's Fox News biography and the host listing for "The Five" at the time of publication, Raw Story has been informed that she was not picked up as a co-host on "The Five" when the show was officially added to the Fox News schedule. The headline and article have been updated accordingly.