Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus dismissed the controversy over Mitt Romney’s joke in his native state of Michigan on Friday, about how nobody has ever asked him for his birth certificate — a reference to the conspiracy theories levied against President Obama.
“Well, you know what, I think it is a nothing,” Priebus said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “The fact is that Mitt Romney, myself, and from the moment that I became chairman — consistently, Gov. Romney has said that this is a non-starter, Barack Obama was born in hawaii.”
CNN host Candy Crowley then asked why it was even brought up, and whether it was an effort to play to the hard-line Republican base.
“Well, first of all, that is not what he was doing. He is a Michigander, and making the point that we are ahead in michigan and doing well in the battleground states, and ‘I’m from michigan and I was born here.’ And you know what, have we really gotten to the point where we can’t have any levity at all in politics? I mean, we have gotten to a place in politics that is ridiculous, and no one can say anything that is remotely humorous. And, you know, the president makes jokes about this all of the time. He plays the — you know, he came out to correspondents dinner a year ago — and I mean, come on.”
