Jeb Bush says Obama is ‘American,’ calls for return to civility
GOP presidential hopeful first to take clear stand after Donald Trump fails to correct audience member who said president 'is a Muslim'
MACKINAC ISLAND, Michigan (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush reacted Friday to the latest controversy roiling the GOP race by identifying President Barack Obama as “an American” and “Christian,” and calling for a return to civility in national politics.
Bush was alluding to an episode Thursday in which rival Donald Trump declined to correct a questioner who called Obama “Muslim” and “not even an American.”
Bush told roughly 2,000 Michigan Republican activists, “I will commit to you that I will never violate my conservative principles. But I will assume that someone that doesn’t agree with me isn’t a bad person.
“We need to begin to get back to that degree of civility before it’s too late in this country,” Bush said.
Bush, the lead speaker at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, said a Republican could carry Michigan in 2016 — for the first time since his father, George H.W. Bush, did it in 1988 — “if we run with heart.”
He said Republicans can “expand the map” of electoral swing states to include Michigan, where metropolitan Detroit has been a Democratic roadblock for the GOP, if “we run a campaign with our arms open, with a hopeful, optimistic message” and “don’t run a campaign looking down at people.”
The Michigan conference comes two days after 11 leading GOP candidates participated in a marathon televised debate in California. It resumes Saturday with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
On Thursday, Trump drew fire from Democrats and some Republicans after declining to rebuke a questioner at a town hall event who insulted Muslims and wrongly said President Barack Obama is a member of the faith.
The question to Trump, the front-runner in the 2016 Republican campaign, came Thursday night at a town hall in Rochester, New Hampshire. The first person the billionaire real estate mogul called on said, “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims.”
“We know our current president is one,” the man said of Obama, who is Christian. “You know he’s not even an American.”
Trump, a driver of the “birther” movement that falsely claimed Obama was born outside the US, first responded with feigned exasperation — “We need the question,” he said, to laughs — before letting the man continue.
“We have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question,” the man in the audience continued. “When can we get rid of it?”
Trump did not dispute the man’s assertion that militants operate training camps on American soil and said he’d heard others raise the issue.
“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. And you know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there,” said Trump. “We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”
Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday condemned Trump’s response after a campaign event in New Hampshire.
“He knew, or he should have known, that what that man was asking was not only way out of bounds, it was untrue,” said. “He should have from the beginning repudiated that kind of rhetoric, that level of hatefulness.”
At the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday it was unfortunate that Trump “wasn’t able to summon the same kind of patriotism” that Republican Sen. John McCain showed in 2008, when he took the microphone away from a woman who said she didn’t trust Obama because he was Arab.
“Mr. Trump isn’t the first Republican politician to countenance these kind of views in order to win votes,” Earnest said. “That’s precisely what every Republican presidential candidate is doing when they decline to denounce Mr. Trump’s cynical strategy.”
But South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham was happy to criticize Trump, saying via Twitter, “There is a right way to handle these situations and a wrong way to handle these situations, Donald.”
Graham tweeted a link to a story about how he condemned a racist comment during a political event earlier this year in Iowa, and then beat the man who made it in a game of pool.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said that “if somebody at one of my town meetings said something like that, I would correct him.” But Christie, appearing Friday on NBC’s “Today” show, also said it is up to Trump to decide how to handle such situations, adding, “I’m not going to lecture him about what to do.”
Others in the Republican field didn’t want to talk about it at all. At a campaign event in South Carolina, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz didn’t respond to questions about Trump or the president’s faith, saying “President Obama’s faith is between him and God.”
Cruz said “we’ve seen the rights of Christians undermined all over the country” under Obama, adding that he “has at times acted as an apologist for radical Islamic terrorists.”
Trump did not respond to shouted questions about the exchange as he left the event, but his campaign released a statement in response that focused on the treatment of Christians in the country.
“The media wants to make this issue about Obama. The bigger issue is that Obama is waging a war against Christians in this country,” it read. “Christians need support in this country. Their religious liberty is at stake.”
Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said that the room was noisy and that Trump had trouble hearing the question. But the questioner was speaking into a microphone, and his remarks could be heard clearly by several journalists sitting near the back of the gymnasium.