Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) insisted that he wasn’t questioning President Barack Obama’s “patriotism” when he told a conservative crowd at a private dinner that he didn’t think the President “loves America.”
But a “CNN Newsroom” panel on Friday morning used the news to actually debate whether Obama is a “patriot.”
The panel consisted of co-hosts John Berman and Kate Bolduan as well as CNN’s John King, liberal commentator Van Jones and Republican strategist Tara Setmayer. The guest panelists agreed right off the bat on one point: that Giuliani’s disputed comments weren’t racist.
“He’s not a racist. He’s an idiot,” Jones said. “You have a fading, failing former icon. It’s so sad to see somebody who inspired the world just 15 years ago just falling down the stairs now, and you can’t even stop digging. It’s really, really embarrassing.”
Bolduan then asked the Republican strategist whether she thought there was any racial undertone in Giuliani’s comments.
“No, absolutely not,” Setmayer replied.
“Rudy Giuliani is talking about the fact that Barack Obama grew up outside of this country,” she added. “He went to schools in Indonesia. He was raised in Hawaii — that’s America, but Hawaii is a different culture than flyover country in America. When you have someone who said that their mentor was a card-carrying communist, he writes a book about ‘Dreams from my Father.’ His father was a huge anti-colonialist who was very anti-American, very Communist.”
Jones challenged Setmayer on that point, asking whether she meant Republicans were “pro-colonialism.” She turned the conversation back to Obama’s upbringing and “associations,” including a years-ago fundraiser for his Senate campaign held in the home of retired professor and former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers.
Setmayer also brought up the divisive Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago pastor whose church Obama attended and who officiated the President’s wedding ceremony.
“You sat in the pews of a church for 20 years with someone who spewed anti-American rhetoric, who said ‘Goddamn America’ from their pews,” she said of Obama. “You sat in that church for 20 years. That person married you. You don’t think people would step back and think?”
Obama condemned Wright’s incendiary remarks during his 2008 presidential campaign.
Bolduan continued to press Setmayer on whether there wasn’t something more important to debate than Obama’s “patriotism.”
“You really think it’s possible that the President of the United States, who’s been reelected and is now at the end of two terms, that he’s not a patriot of this country?” Bolduan asked.
“There’s something that Bill Buckley once said. It’s called ‘synthetic patriotism,'” Setmayer said. “I think the president loves the country in his own mind the way he wants it to be, not the way it is. I think that’s a valid discussion people can have.”
