The president said in a Wednesday special looking back on his legacy, 'I think there's a reason why attitudes about my presidency among whites in Northern states are very different from whites in Southern states.
'Are there folks whose primary concern about me has been that I seem foreign, the other? Are those who champion the "birther" movement feeding off of bias? Absolutely,' he told CNN's Fareed Zakaria.
David Axelrod, a senior advisor to Obama at the White House who now runs the Chicago Institute of Politics, concurred.
'It's indisputable that there was a ferocity to the opposition and a lack of respect to him that was a function of race,' Axelrod told CNN, where he's also paid to work as a contributor.
According to Axelrod, at least one powerful Republican was personally disrespectful to Obama.
'He said to him, we don't really think you should be here but the American people thought otherwise. So we're going to have to work with you'.
Obama's successor, President-elect Donald Trump, promoted birther arguments, encouraging hackers to look into Obama's place of birth in 2014.
Trump said in an August 2012 tweet: 'An "extremely credible source" has called my office and told me that @BarackObama's birth certificate is a fraud.'
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