Mitt Romney, who has decried the nasty personal tone of the presidential campaign, seemed to make a joke about President Obama’s birth certificate while speaking to voters here Friday, re-injecting the issue of the president’s birthplace into the campaign.Here's the video. Complete with a rather reviling crowd reaction.
“Now I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born,” Mr. Romney said, standing alongside his wife, Ann, and his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan. “Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital. I was born in Harper Hospital. No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.”
Mr. Romney is a Michigan native — his father, George Romney, was the state’s governor — and seemed to be speaking off the cuff. But his campaign quickly scrambled to walk back his comments, saying he was simply sharing his Michigan pride.
“The governor has always said, and has repeatedly said, he believes the president was born here in the United States,” said Kevin Madden, an adviser to Mr. Romney, who served as governor of Massachusetts. “He was only referencing that Michigan, where he is campaigning today, is the state where he himself was born and raised.”
In his introduction Thursday, Mr. Ryan, too, seemed to emphasize cultural differences with Mr. Obama, taking pains to include his exurban, nearly all-white audience at an orchard and farm here within a circle excluding the president.
“Remember about four years ago when he was talking to a bunch of donors in San Francisco and he said people in states like ours, we cling to our guns and our religion?” Mr. Ryan said, emphasizing the word “ours.” It was a reference to Mr. Romney’s native Michigan and Mr. Ryan’s Wisconsin, but also, it seemed, to differences based on religion and class.
“I just have one thing to say,” Mr. Ryan added. “This Catholic deer hunter is guilty as charged, and proud of it.”
Romney needs to own this one. As much as he complained about Joe "2Chainz" Biden's pandering comment last week, this is worse.
And he prolly wonders why he got 0% of the black vote.
Question: Does Romney need to apologize? Will he?
