What was that, Huckabee?

WASHINGTON – Former Arkansas Gov. [color:a400=#366388 ! important][color:a400=#366388 ! important]Mike [color:a400=#366388 ! important]Huckabee
suggested in a radio interview that President Barack Obama's childhood
in Kenya shaped his worldview — even though Obama did not visit Kenya
until he was in his 20s.
The potential Republican presidential candidate told New York radio station WOR on Monday that [color:a400=#366388 ! important][color:a400=#366388 ! important]Obama's
youth led him to resent the West, which he said explains why, in
Huckabee's view, Obama's foreign policy differs so greatly from that of
his predecessors.
"One thing that I do know is
his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, (is)
very different than the average American," Huckabee said, pointing to
Obama's decision in 2009 to remove a bust of former Prime Minister [color:a400=#366388 ! important][color:a400=#366388 ! important]Winston [color:a400=#366388 ! important]Churchill from the Oval Office.
He
failed to note that Obama replaced the Oval Office fixture with a bust
of one of his American heroes, President Abraham Lincoln, and moved the
Churchill bust to the White House residence.
"The [color:a400=#366388 ! important][color:a400=#366388 ! important]bust [color:a400=#366388 ! important]of [color:a400=#366388 ! important]Winston [color:a400=#366388 ! important]Churchill,
a great insult to the British," Huckabee said. "But then if you think
about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father
and grandfather . he probably grew up hearing that the British were a
bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."


Obama's
grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was detained in a 1952 uprising
against British colonial rule in Kenya. Huckabee said childhood stories
of the Mau Mau rebellion would lead President Obama to want to remove
from the Oval Office the bust of Churchill, who ordered a crackdown
against that uprising.
The executive director of Huckabee's political action committee said the former governor misspoke.
"When
the governor mentioned he wanted to know more about the president, he
wasn't talking about the president's place of birth — the governor
believes the president was born in Hawaii," Hogan Gidley said. "The
governor would, however, like to know more about where President
Obama's liberal policies come from and what else the president plans to
do to this country — as do most Americans."
Gidley
said Huckabee meant to reference Obama's childhood in Indonesia, where
he lived from the ages of 5 to 10. Gidley didn't explain the connection
to the [color:a400=#366388 ! important][color:a400=#366388 ! important]Mau [color:a400=#366388 ! important]Mau [color:a400=#366388 ! important]uprising.
Obama
was born in Hawaii in 1961 to a mother from Kansas, and a father from
Kenya whom he would barely know and write in his memoir he had met only
once. He spent the first five years of his life in Hawaii and then
moved with his since-divorced mother and her new husband to Indonesia.
At the age of 10, he returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal
grandparents on Oahu until he started his undergraduate degree in Los
Angeles and completed it in New York City.
"The
first time I came to Kenya was in 1987," Obama said at the University
of Nairobi in 2006. "I had just finished three years of work as a
community organizer in low-income neighborhoods of Chicago, and was
about to enroll in law school. My sister, Auma, was teaching that year
at this university, and so I came to stay with her for a month."
Many
conservative activists believe — and some have unsuccessfully filed
lawsuits to prove — that Obama is a Kenyan who does not meet the
Constitution's citizenship requirement. A Washington Post-ABC News poll
last year found 14 percent of Americans say without prompting that they
believe Obama was born in another country. That number rose to 20
percent when those with no opinion were given that as an option.
During
his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama posted a copy of his birth
certificate on his website to confront persistent rumors. It did little
to assuage skeptics who are convinced by Internet rumors and [color:a400=#366388 ! important][color:a400=#366388 ! important]conservative [color:a400=#366388 ! important]talk [color:a400=#366388 ! important]radio hosts that Obama was raised in his father's homeland.
Huckabee
himself has called these suggestions fringe theories that distract from
the serious policy disagreements with Obama. During appearances for his
book tour, he dismissed the so-called "birther" ideas.
And
on Monday, just a few moments after he asserted Obama's Kenyan
upbringing, Huckabee returned to what had been his standard rhetoric on
the question of his birth certificate.
"The only
reason I'm not as confident that there's something about the birth
certificate ... is because 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.
Hillary
Rodham Clinton campaigned against Obama during the 2008 Democratic
primary. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, is a former
governor of Arkansas, like Huckabee.