Post date: Aug 24, 2012 8:21:39 PM
COMMERCE, MICHIGAN, UNITED STATES (AUGUST 24, 2012) (RESTRICTED POOL) - Just days before the Republican National Convention, presidential candidate Mitt Romney took a dig at President Barack Obama on Friday (August 24) over his birth certificate in comments that re-ignited a controversy over the Democrat's eligibility to be president.
Republican presidential Candidate Mitt Romney takes a swipe at the controversy over President Obama's birth certificate.
"I love being home in this place that Anne and I were raised. Where both of us were born. Anne was born in Henry Ford hospital, I was born in Harper hospital. No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate, they know that this is the place we were born and raised," Romney told a rally of some 7,000 people in his home state of Michigan.
Romney's comments were a reference to widely discredited theories that Obama, whose father was from Kenya, was not born in the United States and thus is not eligible to be president.
Conservative fringes of the Republican Party - including high-profile Romney backer Donald Trump - have argued that Obama was not born in Hawaii as he says.
Obama has released multiple copies of his birth certificate that show he was born an American citizen to try to end "birther" controversy.
Romney's camp tried to dampen the effect of his birth certificate remark, which was made at an outdoor rally at a farm near Detroit.
"The governor has always said, and has repeatedly said, he believes the president was born here in the United States," advisor Kevin Madden said. "He was only referencing that Michigan, where he is campaigning today, is the state where he himself was born and raised."
Romney, who has been pressed by Democrats to release his complete tax records, mentioned the birth certificate despite saying recently that the campaign had taken a nasty tone.