Huckabee: ‘Anti-British’ Obama grew up in Kenya

Mike Huckabee, one of the veteran Republicans expected to run in the 2012 White House race, has apologised for making an error during a radio interview in which he claimed that President Barack Obama grew up in Kenya.

But some observers believe the gaffe was intentional – that the former governor of Arkansas intends to exploit the mythology that Obama never grew up in the United States and is somehow not a real American.
 
Huckabee, who is as strident in his right-wing opinions and as gaffe-prone as that other possible 2012 contender Sarah Palin, announced that Obama was anti-British because he spent his childhood in Kenya. "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."
 
(Fact: Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 and lived in Indonesia between the ages of five and 10. He first visited Kenya, to meet members of his extended family, in 1987.)
 
Huckabee then suggested that a bust of Winston Churchill, presented to George W Bush by Tony Blair as a mark of solidarity in the wake of 9/11, had been removed from the Oval Office because of Churchill's role in putting down the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in 1952. Obama's Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was detained during the uprising.
 
Huckabee claimed removing the bust was "a great insult to the British" and added: "Growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, he probably heard that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."
 
Immediately after the interview, Huckabee's spokesman said he "simply misspoke" and added: "The governor meant to say the President grew up in Indonesia." But the spokesman had no explanation for his boss having built his entire argument on the ‘Kenyan connection’.

In the past, Huckabee has distanced himself from the 'birthers', those conspiracy theorists who believe that Obama’s birth certificate was faked and that he was not born in the US and is therefore ineligible to be president.

On the contrary, Huckabee has said that had Obama been lying about his background it would have come out during his battle for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination with Hilary Clinton.
 
So the radio interview has been greeted with dismay in liberal quarters of the American media, where some observers now believe that Obama's background will once again become an election issue.
 
Washington Post blogger Stephen Stromberg said the slip "demonstrates the extent to which references to birther-like mythology... have become embedded in conservative political culture".
 
Amy Sullivan, writing on Time magazine's website wondered: "Another misstatement, perhaps? Or is this the GOP playbook for 2012?"
 
Huckabee enjoys controversy. Last year he said that Bradley Manning, the US soldier alleged to have passed classified information to WikiLeaks, should be hanged. ·