[caption id=”attachment_120102″ align=”aligncenter” width=”970″] AP Photo
[/caption]
Rudy Giuliani clearly hit a nerve yesterday when his comments questioning President Obama’s love of his country went viral.
“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said before a group of conservatives Wednesday, as quoted by Politico.
Prominent Democrats immediately seized on the words and condemned Giuliani and the GOP for the quote.
“We can disagree on issues, but when GOPers stay silent while one of their own questions the President’s patriotism, we have a real problem,” Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz tweeted.
Wasserman Schultz expanded on this during a speech that was played on MSNBC, Mediaite reported.
“Now, in fairness, the mayor did clarify his remarks this morning — on Fox News, naturally,” she said. “What he said was, ‘I’m not questioning his patriotism, I’m just saying he doesn’t love America like we do.’ I’m glad we got that cleared up.”
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio called Giuliani’s comments “pitiful” during a press conference, according to the New York Observer.
“I find it a cheap political trick for Rudy Giuliani to question our president’s love of his country. That is stooping very, very—low even for him,” de Blasio said.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz called it “a horrible thing to say.”
But the Democratic outrage seemed strange, especially since the questions surrounding Obama’s patriotism were nothing new and not limited to Giuliani.
T. Becket Adams at the Washington Examiner explains:
In an article published in 2008 by CBS News, Kathy Frankovic reported: “Democratic presumptive nominee Barack Obama … has been dogged by false rumors that question his patriotism.”
Frankovic then cited a CBS News/New York Times survey that showed only 29 percent of respondents said they would describe the then-senator as “very patriotic,” while an overwhelming 70 percent of respondents said the same of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
“The doubts about Obama weren’t just from Republicans,” Frankovic reported. “In late April, Obama and Clinton were still engaged in their primary battles, and more Democratic primary voters (61 percent) thought McCain was ‘very patriotic’ than thought Obama was (39 percent).”
“Even groups that were very positive about Obama displayed a ‘patriotism gap.’ Forty seven percent of people with more than a college education said Obama was very patriotic, 83 percent of them said McCain was. Thirty nine percent of young voters thought Obama was very patriotic, but 57 percent of them thought that about McCain,” she wrote. “African-Americans, Obama’s strongest supporters, were just as likely to describe McCain as very patriotic as to say Obama was.”
The backlash was also surprising given some of Obama’s own comments about Republican leaders.
One of Obama’s most famous quotes from the 2008 campaign trail was when he called then-President George W. Bush “unpatriotic” for adding trillions to the national debt.
He also made headlines in early 2014 for agreeing with a donor at a Democratic fundraiser who called Republicans “un-American” because of voter identification laws. Obama did not disagree and instead responded with, “How is it that we’re putting up with that?”
