HispanicBusiness

President Obama sought to tamp down the furor this week surrounding racial comments made by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, saying Republican outrage over Reid's utterance about Obama's light skin tone "makes absolutely no sense."

"There was nothing mean-spirited in what he had to say," Obama said Monday in an interview with TV One, which targets African American adults.

Reid has been hammered by Republicans for his quote in "Game Change," a new book about the 2008 election, that Obama was an electable African American owing to his being "light-skinned" and having "no Negro dialoect, unless he wanted to have one."

Republicans such as GOP Party chairman Michael Steele -- who is African American -- have pounced on the statement, saying it is no less egregious than the racially suggestive remarks that tarnished the career of former GOP Sen. Trent Lott in 2002.

"There's a big double standard here," Steele said on NBC's "Meet the Press," where he called for Reid's resignation.

Lott made his controversial remark at a function celebrating the 100th birthday of Sen. Strom Thurmond, infamous for his support of segregation.

"When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him," Lott had said. "We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either."

But Obama has dismissed GOP outrage as a political distraction from the real issues.

"The fact that we spend days on this instead of talking about the unemployment rate or talking about how we deal with critical issues like energy and health care is an indication of why I think people don't understand what's happening in Washington," Obama said, according to DailyCaller.com. "I guarantee you the average person -- white or black -- right now is less concerned about what Harry Reid said in a quote in a book a couple of years ago than they are about how we are going to move the country forward."