Huckabee: I Didn't Even Bring Up Natalie Portman

Mike Huckabee has more to say on both of his recent headline-making statements: That Barack Obama grew up in Kenya, and that Natalie Portman is setting a bad example with her out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Mediaite reports Huckabee’s comments from Sirius Radio’s POTUS channel:

• On Kenya: “The reaction ranged from, ‘This guy is so dumb he doesn’t know that Barack Obama grew up in Indonesia not Kenya,’ all the way to the other extreme, I saw people like Andrea Mitchell saying, ‘Oh no, he did this on purpose, he is very smart and shrewd, he did this in a calculating way.' Well, I can’t be both. I can’t be the dumbest guy in the room and the smartest guy in the room at the same time. I have to be one or the other, or maybe it was just that I made a mistake, I corrected it.”

• On Portman: “I didn’t bring Natalie Portman up at all. She’s a great actress. I’ve said many times, she deserves her Oscar. He [radio host Michael Medved] brought up Natalie Portman. He brought up her acceptance at the Oscars speech, in the context of the first chapter of my book, and that’s how he kind of got into it, because I talk about the importance of the family as being the most fundamental unit of government. So in the course of that, he asked me about her acceptance speech. I used that as a segue, not to talk about Natalie Portman, but to talk about the economic realities of unwed mothers.”

Click for one analyst’s assessment that both of these comments will result in Huckabee being taken “less seriously” as a presidential candidate. (More Mike Huckabee stories.)