Take that bastion of news independence, CNN. During much of Thursday, the main story at CNN.com was titled, "Could Obama's Struggles With White Voters Cost Him The Election?"

With inside two weeks until the presidential election and Mitt Romney's campaign awash in momentum, the left's accomplices in the mainstream media and in the ivory towers of academia have ramped up their efforts to mix race into the fray, trying to guilt whites into again voting for Obama or else make them feel as though they are racists.

CNN called upon Mark Anthony Neal, a cultural and black studies professor at Duke University, to comment on the story. Neal, a staunch leftist and liberal blogger, stated, "Part of the reason we're thinking about this is the dynamic of this being a black president."

He went on to say, "If we were in a post-race society, the measurement is not the election of Obama but the re-election of President Obama. He still had to perform and he has been held on a short leash in that context."

What happened to the initial election of Barack Obama as being indicative of a changed America -- an America where someone of any color, race, or ethnicity could sit in the Oval Office? It was, in fact, the New York Times which heralded the election of Barack Obama in a November 5, 2008 story, using the headline, "Obama Elected President As Racial Barrier Falls."

Evidently the benchmark of a post-racial America has suddenly moved from the election of a black president to the re-election of a black president. If Obama is re-elected, will the benchmark of proving a post-racial America move to the people insisting that the 22nd Amendment be repealed?

Neal's comment that Obama, because he's black, "has been held on a short leash" is preposterous. Every president is held on a four-year leash, if you will. Obama has had just as much time as other presidents to make the grade and convince voters that he should be re-elected.

Professor Neal further ignited the racism cry when he exclaimed, "Many voters including black voters don't feel Obama performed exceptionally [on the economy.] ... So much of what we've seen in terms of Romney support is a fundamental distrust of Obama because he's not giving the goods. That argument is easier to be made because he's black. ... It's not so much they are voting for Romney because he's white but the economy protects them. They don't have to feel guilty because of the economy. The economy lets them off the hook."

So Professor Neal is claiming that, in reality, many people who vote against Obama in 2012, especially white voters, are subconsciously voting against Obama because he's black. However, they can feel better about themselves because they can blame the economy. If Obama loses, then, according to Neal's spewing, it's because we racist white folks can't get past the color of our skin. Never mind the fact that so many of us don't have jobs or have jobs paying less than what we have grown accustomed to; those aren't the real reasons we're voting for Romney this time. It's because we are racists. Yeah, that's it.

Those comments by Neal are bathed in the utmost of idiocy and folly. Perhaps Neal would be wise to recall the story Jesus told in His Sermon on the Mount, when he told his audience not to pick the speck out of your brother's eye without first removing the log from your own.

How Neal has an ounce of credibility is a mystery.

But CNN continued on Thursday by providing a racial voting bloc calculator so that those on CNN.com could tinker with the voting percentages of blacks, whites, Hispanics, and others. Now, that may seem harmless, but imagine if Fox News had a similar tool on its webpage. The uproar would be immense. You see, it's the left that so often sees the world, the issues, and elections through racial lenses.

We then have MSNBC host Chris Matthews. You remember Matthews's claim, back in 2008, that hearing Obama speak resulted in "a thrill running up my leg." With Obama struggling down the stretch of his re-election bid, Matthews now says that it's "racial hatred" which is fueling Romney's rise and Obama's fall, associating those of the "white working class" and those from the South with that "racial hatred" remark.

Matthews went on to recently interview Clarence Page, an African-American and writer at The Chicago Tribune, regarding Sarah Palin's recent comments that Obama was engaging in "shuck and jive" in his handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack. Matthews and Page, of course, agreed that Palin's criticism of Obama had a racial overtone, and therein was the issue with which they were enamored -- not the Benghazi mishandling, mind you. It was the supposed racial aspect.

To illustrate the lunacy in these charges, Page admitted he had to look up the term to see where it was derived. In other words, he knew it had to do with black people and that it should be offensive, but he didn't know why he should be offended -- nor, no doubt, would most African-Americans. You just cannot make up the Left's level of hypocrisy when it comes to racism.

Matthews later went on to interview Jonathan Alters, Bloomberg View columnist and MSNBC contributor. They discussed Trump's request to see Obama's college transcripts. Of course, Matthews and Alters considered this racist. In fact, Alters was adamant in using the term "racist." Matthews and Alter believed that the request was so that Trump and others could prove perhaps that Obama was a product of affirmative action more than academic merit.

Where were these two when President George W. Bush's college transcripts were being hunted? Oh, of course -- they were conspicuously absent.

With the election drawing near and some Americans having already voted, I suppose that if we white people vote for Romney instead of Obama, we might just as well be white supremacists in the eyes of the elite leftist media and academia.

That would make us much like the late West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who was a leader of his local Ku Klux Klan chapter. But he was a Democrat, and we should all know that racism does not exist in the Democratic Party. That's just for us white Republicans or independents -- especially if we don't pull the lever to re-elect our first African-American president.

Chad Stafko is a writer and political consultant living in the Midwest. He can be reached at stafko@msn.com.