“I can’t spend all my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead,’’ the president said. And he said he has faith in “the American people’s capacity to get beyond all this nonsense.’’
A poll released earlier this month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center showed that 18 percent of people believe Obama is Muslim. That was up from 11 percent who said so in March 2009. Just 34 percent said Obama is Christian, down from 48 percent who said so last year.
The White House responded in a statement after the poll’s release, reiterating that Obama “is a committed Christian.’’
A day after his rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Glenn Beck, Fox News’s conservative commentator, yesterday renewed his criticism of Obama, taking aim at the president’s religious beliefs in a appearance on “Fox News Sunday.’’
Beck has said that many Americans don’t think Obama is a Christian because they don’t recognize the faith that he’s practicing, which Beck called a form of “collective salvation’’ rather than the personal salvation some believe is taught in the Bible.
In the Fox interview, Beck said Obama “is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor and victim.’’
“People aren’t recognizing his version of Christianity . . . and 48 percent of the African-American community doesn’t recognize it either, by the way,’’ he said.
Incumbents win primaries in W. Virginia, Louisiana
West Virginia’s popular governor, Joe Manchin, will face John Raese, the wealthy businessman who won the GOP primary, in the race to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late Robert C. Byrd.
Manchin easily won the Democratic nomination Saturday. Raese defeated a crowded field of Republicans and becomes part of the GOP quest to dismantle the Democratic Senate majority as high unemployment and the slow economic recovery threaten their political prospects this fall.
In Louisiana, scandal-tainted US Senator David Vitter, a Republican, easily beat two little-known challengers and will meet Democratic Representative Charlie Melancon, who won his party’s primary, in November.
