Possible 2012 Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee is cleaning up his mess after making controversial comments about President Obama’s upbringing.
In a Feb. 28 radio interview with WOR in New York to promote his book, Huckabee made controversial comments falsely claiming that Obama was raised in Kenya and received anti-Western ideology from his father. “If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather,” Huckabee said on air.
Huckabee immediately caught flack over the comments as it gave credence to widely disproved theory that Obama wasn’t born in America. Given that a viable presidential candidate said this had many wondering how serious Huckabee should be taken as contender in 2012.
“On Monday, while on Steve Malzberg’s radio show on New York’s WOR Radio, I was asked about the President Obama’s birth certificate issue,” Huckabee said in a statement. “In my answer, I simply misspoke when I alluded to President Obama growing up in ‘Kenya’ and meant to say Indonesia.”
While Obama was primarily raised in Hawaii and partly in Indonesia, questions still remain about what Huckabee was really implying. In particular, Huckabee spoke of the Mau Mau Uprising, which was a Kenyan revolution that took place from 1952-1960. Had Huckabee just misspoke about the about the countries involved, many are asking why he would’ve brought up the Mau Mau Uprising.
“A slip would be saying “Osama” instead of “Obama” when referring to the president,” Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post said in a column. “What the former Arkansas governor, who is reportedly thinking about running for the Republican presidential nomination again in 2012, did was inexplicably slide head-first into the far right’s nether world of conspiracy and paranoia.”
Despite the criticism, Huckabee says the entire situation has been blown out of proportion and that he really believes that the president was born in U.S. “As I have stated on page 1 of my new book ‘A Simple Government’ and in numerous interviews with dozens of reporters – I don’t believe there is an issue with Barack Obama’s birth certificate,” Huckabee went on to say. “However, I do believe there are serious issues with the President’s policies, and I have been openly opposed to the President’s world view.”