Rick Perry on Birthers: 'It Doesn’t Matter' Where Obama was Born
Rick Perry’s comments on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate have caused quite a stir of controversy.
Perry, in an interview with Parade magazine’s Lynn Sherr, said that he “[didn’t] have any idea” whether President Obama’s birth certificate was real or not.
Add this to the fact that Perry recently had dinner with Donald Trump – arguably the most powerful proponent of the “birther” argument – and there’s a legitimate cause for concern.
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Perry said that the business mogul “doesn’t think it’s real (the certificate).” When asked by Sherr if he believed that Obama was born in the U.S., Perry said, “I have no reason to think otherwise.”
The birther conspiracy was actually started by anonymous supporters of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008, according to Politico.com. At the time, Clinton was behind in the polls for the Democratic Party nomination.
Trump, on an interview with “Good Morning America” earlier in 2011, said he was considering putting his financial resources into his own presidential campaign. On the same television session, he added, “Growing up no one knew him (Obama).”
This, along with other publicly skeptic interviews dealing with Obama’s birth certificate, found Trump with a significant following in the polls for a Republican presidential candidate just a few months later.
Now, the Texas governor has fallen from the Republican frontrunner for the nomination to third place, behind the pizza shop tycoon Herman Cain and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.
Some media outlets accused Perry of using the birther claim to boost his poll ratings the way Trump did.
What many media outlets failed to cover was Perry’s later statements in the same interview with Sherr.
His final response about the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate was: “I don’t have any idea. It doesn’t matter. He’s the President of the United States. He’s elected. It’s a distractive issue.”
Later on in the interview, Perry highlighted his reasons for running for president, as well as the need for a stronger economy.
Perry said to Sherr, “It’s about getting America back to work.”
