Huckabee Questions Obama Birth Certificate

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, talks about his new book, “A Simple Government: Twelve Things We Really Need From Washington (and a Trillion That We Don’t!),” at the National Press Club.

Click to Listen: Excerpt of WOR’s The Steve Malzberg Show

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, said on Monday that he would “love to know more” about where President Obama was born and claimed — falsely — that Mr. Obama was raised in Kenya.

On Tuesday, a spokesman for Mr. Huckabee said that the former governor had “simply misspoke.”

Mr. Huckabee’s comments were prompted by the conservative radio host Steve Malzberg, who asked Mr. Huckabee: “How come we don’t have a health record, we don’t have a college record, we don’t have a birth certificate — why, Mr. Obama, did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate?”

The former governor responded: “I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough.” Mr. Huckabee, who is now a Fox News host, then talked repeatedly about his concerns that Mr. Obama was raised in Kenya. (The audio of the entire interview with Mr. Huckabee was posted on the WOR Web site.)

“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,” Mr. Huckabee said.

Mr. Obama did not grow up in Kenya. According to his official biography, the president was raised primarily in Hawaii by his mother and maternal grandparents and spent several years in Indonesia when he was a young boy.

In a statement released Tuesday evening, Hogan Gidley, the executive director of HuckPAC, Mr. Huckabee’s political action committee, said that Mr. Huckabee “simply misspoke” and that “he meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia.

“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,” Mr. Gidley said. “The governor would, however, like to know more about where President Obama’s liberal policies come from.”

Mr. Obama’s father was from Kenya, but in his first book, Mr. Obama wrote extensively about the fact that he spent almost no time with his father, who left his mother and saw Mr. Obama only once, in Hawaii.

As a potential Republican candidate for president, Mr. Huckabee has previously dismissed questions about the authenticity of Mr. Obama’s birth records.

“If there was any shred of truth to it, Hillary Clinton and her wonderful investigative opposition (research) machine would have found it and would have used it,” Mr. Huckabee said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program just last week. “I think is a waste of energy and time.”

Most of Mr. Huckabee’s potential rivals for the Republican nomination have also distanced themselves from the “birther” movement, suggesting that they have no reason to doubt that the president was born in the United States.

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and another potential candidate, has also accused Mr. Obama of having a “Kenyan world view.” Mr. Gingrich made the comments last year after an article in Forbes magazine raised questions about Mr. Obama’s upbringing and his approach to the world.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said at the time that Mr. Gingrich was “trying to appeal to the fringe of people that don’t believe the president was born in this country,” Mr. Gibbs said. “You would normally expect better from somebody who had held the position of speaker of the House.”

Mr. Huckabee’s comments on the radio show Monday suggested that he was more willing to entertain those questions than in the past. Mr. Mazlberg asked a second time about the birth certificate, saying, “If you have one and it’s there, why not show it?”

Mr. Huckabee answered by repeating his assertion about Mrs. Clinton, who ran against Mr. Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2008. “The only reason I’m not as confident that there’s something about the birth certificate, Steve, is because I know the Clintons,” he said. “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.”