Romney won't dump Trump

Donald Trump is once again, out of nowhere, dominating the 2012 campaign. But this time, he’s overshadowing the GOP standard-bearer who also happens to be his own pick: Mitt Romney.

More than a year after Trump made headlines doubting President Barack’s Obama’s birthplace and claimed to have investigators on the ground in Hawaii, Trump is essentially dismissing the legitimacy of the commander-in-chief’s birth certificate, asserting the president was clearly born in Kenya and “told the truth” to a literary agent who listed him that way two decades ago.


So far, Romney is staying mostly silent on those claims — saying he can’t control his supporters.

( PHOTOS: 11 politicians with Trump)

Trump’s comments to the Daily Beast last week came just as the Romney campaign was touting the real-estate mogul as the fundraising counterweight to George Clooney, promoting a “dine with Mitt and Donald” contest to raise money for the Republican’s coffers.

The Donald is also hosting a high-dollar fundraiser for Romney at his Las Vegas hotel tonight, along with Newt Gingrich (who himself spent months stoking questions about the president’s sympathies with people of the Muslim faith) — providing a high-profile joint appearance on the heels of Trump’s latest declaration, one that Democrats are calling on the Romney to denounce.

“He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth,” Trump said about Obama’s birthplace, basing his assertion on a literary biography written for Obama that was recently unearthed by Breitbart.com. “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. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”

When pressed by reporters on his campaign plane, Romney on Monday shrugged off Trump’s renewed birther theories.

“You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me, and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in,” Romney said. “But I need to get to 50.1 percent or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”

Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom on Friday, in a CNN interview, said the candidate has made clear that he accepts where the president was born, and that the election will be focused on the economy. But he did not criticize Trump.

The Trump drama is yet another twist in a 2012 cycle that has been dominated by pseudo-surrogates — Hilary Rosen on the left, Rush Limbaugh on the right — in which each side demands the other denounce the words of someone with a tenuous connection to the campaign. The latest example was a proposal to a super PAC, led by businessman Joe Ricketts, seeking to sell attack ads featuring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (it was rejected).

But in this case, Trump is an actual Romney surrogate — one who has recorded robocalls for the presumptive GOP nominee, hosted a fundraiser for his wife Ann in his Fifth Avenue home, and pressed the candidate’s case on Fox News and elsewhere. The mogul’s brashness — and willingness to take the fight to the president — was what made him appealing as a potential presidential candidate himself to the GOP primary base last year. That very same boldness is the quality Republican voters have long questioned in Romney.

“I’ve been known as being a very smart guy for a long time,” Trump told CNBC on Monday. “I don’t consider myself birther or not birther, but there are some major questions here that the press doesn’t want to cover. Now, if that were somebody else they’d be covering it and they’d be throwing people out of office, but they don’t want to cover it.”

The GOP base still gets stoked by the attack line about Obama’s birth place. And it was striking the extent to which Republicans interviewed for this article gave Romney public cover for his association with Trump and viewed Romney’s connection with Trump as a net-plus for the campaign.

One invitee to today’s Las Vegas event went even further.

Former Nevada Gov. Bob List, a former Republican National Committee member who lobbied on Romney’s behalf during the raucous negotiations surrounding the Nevada caucus, said “there is still a mystery” surrounding the president’s citizenship.

“There may be people who support President Obama who think he was born in Kenya, I don’t know,” List said. “There still is a mystery. There is a certain mystery about Mr. Obama, some intrigue there, driven I think mainly over his secrecy about his college records. Maybe he claimed to be a foreign student for purposes of admission to college, I think that’s kind of where this thing has drifted.”

A Romney adviser said the campaign agreed to hold the Las Vegas fundraiser with Trump — along with an April New York soiree featuring Trump’s wife Melania and Ann Romney — when the hotel and casino magnate formally endorsed Romney in February.

“The commitment was made and at the time everybody was rather muted,” the adviser said. “It’s hard to undo it now. If you undo it now it looks like you’re throwing him under the bus. I don’t think this is the way it was planned.”

The adviser characterized Trump’s latest foray into birtherism as a distraction the campaign didn’t need at a moment it had built some momentum against Obama.

“We’ve had a very, very good week,” the adviser said Friday. “We don’t need to get distracted by stuff like this.”

Yet other Republicans close to the campaign said there was a clear benefit to the campaign’s connection with Trump, whose positions and statements about the president are well-known.

The birther fixation brought Trump fierce denouncements from black entertainers and civil-rights groups last year, and the issue helped to harden the celebrity’s negative poll numbers. Trump’s new remarks also come at a time when Romney is trying to send signals to moderates and swing voters who will matter in November that he is not the extreme figure Democrats are painting him.

“Bill Clinton scored a lot of points” doing that in Jackson’s venue, the Democrat said, questioning whether Romney would do the same.

Yet Romney, who appeared to cringe while shaking hands with Trump when the mogul endorsed Romney in Las Vegas in February, clearly has no desire to alienate The Donald, whose media megaphone and ability to generate headlines can prove dangerous if he doesn’t like someone.

“Trump is one of those personalities that you’d rather have speaking positively than negatively about you,” said Rep. Tom Cole, a former head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “He has the ability to create a lot of attention and has reach within the Republican base but also with that crowd out there that tends to be critical of all things political. I don’t think that’s going to hurt him a great deal.”

“I think it is definitely incumbent upon Romney either not to go or (to the Las Vegas fundraiser), or stand in Trump’s presence and denounce birtherism,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, the MSNBC host who has also been an Obama supporter, and who has observed the New York developer and entertainment mogul for decades.

“Part of the whisper campaign against the president…is that he’s ‘other’ than us, ‘other’ than American… Trump’s contribution to the 2012 election has been the birther movement. To stand next to him and not address it is in many ways the height of double-speak by Romney….We’re talking about something that directly involves the (campaign).”

“Trump is sort of a side show, freak show, fact-twister, who doesn’t help you with that audience” of independents and moderates who like the president personally, and are turned off by harsh attacks, said one Republican operative. But that operative was the exception among a GOP strategist class that generally said they think the attacks, while perhaps uncomfortable for Romney, won’t do him any damage with voters, for whom the Trump-to-outrageous-behavior ratio is fairly baked in.

Democrats, who have pressed Romney for the last year to take a stand at moments like Limbaugh’s slam on law student Sandra Fluke as a “slut,” are going to press Romney hard for declining to join Trump, while also not criticizing him over a comment that over such an explosive comment.

“Donald Trump has become the Birther in Chief,” said Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. “This once again raises questions about whether Mitt Romney will stand up to the extreme elements of his party or embrace them.”

Steve Murphy, a Democratic strategist who isn’t with the campaign, said, “If Romney goes through with the Trump fundraiser he’ll be raising 10 times as much money for Obama. And the president should sue Trump. The allegation is knowingly false and malicious.”

If anything, the number of Republicans openly saying that people don’t confuse Trump’s views for Romney’s reflect a fulcrum shift from 2008, when Sen. John McCain declared as off-limits anything that could have a whiff of racial undertones — a move a number of Republicans have since questioned, at least as it pertains to the issue of the controversial and incendiary Rev. Wright.

One prominent Democrat said denouncing Trump provided another opportunity for Romney to have a “Sistah Souljah moment,” noting that when Bill Clinton criticized the rapper for racially inflammatory remarks, he did it while addressing the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.

Trump senior counsel Michael Cohen pushed back on Democrats, saying, “Donald Trump and Mitt Romney may not agree on everything. What they do agree on is substantially more important than the birthplace of President Obama; such as curtailing our out of control spending, reducing the deficit, creating jobs, eliminating our dependency on foreign oil, national security and stopping foreign countries (like China) from waging economic warfare against America. The Obama liberal media uses this issue as a way to distract potential voters from (Obama’s) failures as a leader.”

Cohen added that the “Democratic machine” is hoping to diminish Trump’s role as a surrogate for Romney, saying, “They can only hope for this as Mr. Trump’s massive popularity and proven abilities to raise funds for the Governor will be an integral part in winning the White House in 2012. If the President would just be transparent, as he promised he would be in his 2008 campaign, this issue would not be relevant. Just another broken promise to those of us who believed in him and voted for him.”

Trump is not the only Romney surrogate or associate who has ventured toward conspiracies about Obama.

One of Romney’s sons tweeted, and later apologized, a line about the president’s college transcripts, which have long been cited as evidence of Obama hiding something. Romney has also embraced Trump in full — both he and Ann Romney have repeatedly, and publicly, thanked him for his help, and a number of people close to the campaign believe the reality- show host was a help in close spots like the Michigan primary.

A number of Republicans argued the focus on Trump was unfair — noting that Democrats hadn’t been much moved by Bill Maher, who’s not an Obama surrogate but donated $1 million to the pro-Obama super PAC, and has criticized Ann Romney and called Mormonism a “cult.”

“At this point, Romney and Obama should just issue a blanket apology for anything stupid that any supporter says and does between now and Nov. 6th and get on to campaigning on the big issues this country faces,” said Republican strategist Ana Navarro. “(The) only time they should disavow idiotic statements is if they are made by a paid staffer, a relative, someone introducing them at an event or themselves. Short of that, only if disavowal scores political brownie points.”

“Should all of the Hollywood stars and starlets that surround themselves around Obama be looked at for their different political views they espouse or slippery public and private lives that they lead?” asked Ken Khachigian, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and a strategist for McCain’s 2000 campaign.

Khachigan added: “I don’t have any particularly outraged concern that Romney is raising money with Donald Trump. Donald Trump isn’t going to be secretary of the Treasury and he’s not going to be chief of staff at the White House.”

A Romney state chairman in a swing state, confused about why the former Massachusetts governor would continue to associate with Trump, surmised that the buttoned-up Romney is seeking to add some sizzle to the campaign.

“They don’t often get a chance to talk to a bunch of people who don’t follow politics. It’s an entrée into that ‘Entertainment Tonight’ world,” the state chairman said. “If you’re going to have a criticism of the governor’s campaign, it is they are pretty tightly wound around the axle. This is a way to loosen it up a little bit. He’s a guy who understands pop culture. Trump, whatever you want to say about the guy, he is a part of pop culture.”

And Rep. Aaron Schock, a key Romney supporter in Illinois, said, “I think he and Ann truly like Donald and his wife. They have spoken favorably about them both privately.”

Alex Castellanos, who advised Romney in 2008, said the contrast actually works in Romney’s favor.

“Once you get into a general, having a little looniness on your right is not the worst thing,” Castellanos said. “It gives you something to bounce off of. There’s nothing that make you more rational than standing next to Donald Trump…nobody thinks Mitt Romney is ‘that guy.’”

Charlie Black, who advised McCain and condemned some of Gingrich’s more blatant Muslim-based crowd-baiting, agreed, saying, “I don’t think people attribute that to Romney…they know and they expect (Trump) to say some outrageous things. The Trump endorsement doesn’t help Romney but it doesn’t hurt him.”

There are also the reminders of why the repeatedly-debunked claims about the president’s birthplace persist — it resonates with a segment of the GOP.

Former Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, who ran for president in 2008, said he wouldn’t think twice about raising money with Trump.

“I can tell you that I certainly have no idea where the president was born. He could have easily have been born in Hawaii or Kenya,” Tancredo said. “If I were in charge of the campaign and you could raise enough money with Donald Trump, I’d say, ‘I don’t care if he said he was born on Venus.’”