Thaindian News

Washington/Seattle, Mar. 2 (ANI): Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has landed in a fix by saying that President Barack Obama grew up in Kenya and not in Indonesia.

But a spokesman for the possible GOP presidential contender described it as just a slip of the tongue.

“Governor Huckabee simply misspoke when he alluded to President Obama growing up in Kenya. The governor meant to say the president grew up in Indonesia,” said J. Hogan Gidley, who works for Huckabee’s political-action committee.

The potential Republican presidential candidate told New York radio station WOR on Monday that Obama’s youth led him to resent the West, which he said explains why Obama’s foreign policy differs so greatly from that of his predecessors.

He said Obama, “having grown up in Kenya,” might view the British as imperialists.

In that same interview, Huckabee said Obama had lived in the African country with his “father and grandfather.”

The president, who spent most of his formative years in Hawaii, lived in Indonesia for four years as a child. In his memoir, Obama said he first visited Kenya in the late 1980s as an adult.

According to the Washington Post and the Seattle Times, Huckabee also noted Obama’s decision in 2009 to return a bust of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, failing to note that the bust was on loan from former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who offered it to President George W. Bush in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a symbol of trans-Atlantic solidarity.

Huckabee said childhood stories of the Mau Mau rebellion would lead President Obama to want to return the bust of Churchill, who ordered a crackdown against that uprising. (ANI)