"I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough," Huckabee said of the president in an interview with New York radio station WOR. "And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American."Huckabee, the former presidential candidate and current Fox News host who has said he is thinking about mounting another campaign, added, "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 are a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."
Despite mixing up his facts (Obama's father was Kenyan, while Obama himself was born in Hawaii and grew up in Indonesia), Huckabee rejected the notion that the president is anything but a natural born citizen:
In the interview with WOR's Steve Malzberg, Huckabee repeated his stance that he does not doubt the president was born in the United States.
"I know the Clintons…and believe me, they have lots of investigators out on him, and I'm convinced if there was anything that they could have found on that, they would have found it, and I promise they would have used it," Huckabee said.
Self-appointed Birther hunter Dave Weigel summarizes the bizarre exchange:
I'll give Huckabee the benefit of the doubt and say he put a few different ideas in the blender. So he's not a birther; he does reveal an odd ignorance of the biography of the man he occasionally out-polls in the 2012 presidential election. (That said, I'm not sure if Obama could pass a pop quiz on the early years of Mike Huckabee.)The ideas Huckabee may have accidentally "blended" are (1) Obama's early years abroad and (2) the premise of a
This appears to have been an awkward error or memory lapse by Huckabee, and nothing more.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member