He's black. He's not Republican. Times are hard and people need a scapegoat. People are falling on hard times who have believed all their lives that it's just the lazy and feckless people who lose their homes, go unemployed for months, etc. -- so now it happens to them, they are incapable of overturning their previous belief that the poor are that way because they deserve to be -- so they look for some other reason for their new-found misfortune (since obviously it can't be because THEY are unworthy of continued success).