US election: Mitt Romney under growing pressure to dump Donald Trump over ‘birther’ row

“McCain stood up to the voices of extremism in his party,” said an
on-screen caption in between clips of Mr Trump repeating the conspiracy and
Mr McCain knocking it down, “Why won’t Mitt Romney do the same?”

However the Romney campaign, which polls show is locked in an almost dead-heat
battle with Mr Obama, appears determined to not drop Mr Trump who lends some
star power to the ticket.

Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior Romney aide, also declined to condemn Mr Trump’s
remarks recent interviews, while repeating that Mr Romney did not share
those views.

“I can’t speak for Donald Trump … but I can tell you that Mitt Romney
accepts that President Obama was born in the United States,” Mr
Fehrnstrom said, “He doesn’t view the place of his birth as an issue in
this campaign.”

Conservative pundits have also questioned the wisdom of Mr Romney continuing
to associate with Mr Trump who endorsed the former Massachusetts governor in
February after giving up on his own short-lived campaign for president.

“I do not understand the cost benefit here,” George Will, the
conservative commentator, said last weekend, “The cost of appearing
with this bloviating ignoramus is obvious, it seems to me.”

The “birther conspiracy” was supposedly laid to rest in 2011 after
the White House published the long version of Mr Obama’s birth certificate
in a bid to silence the rumours.

However the story was revived earlier this month after the conservative
website Breitbart.com
discovered that Mr Obama’s literary agency had described him in its
catalogue of authors as “Born
in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii” in 1991.

The author of the catalogue biography quickly issued a statement describing
the ‘blurb’ as a “simple mistake” and a “fact-checking error”
and stating that Mr Obama had not provided the information on which the
entry was based.

However Mr Trump said he was not convinced. “That’s the way life works He
didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth,” he
said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “The literary agent wrote
down what he said He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia Now
they’re saying it was a mistake. Give me a break.”

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