Donald Trump says he
wants to end the Obama citizenship controversy so he can return to “making America
great again," but accusations about “bigotry” and other personal attacks
at his and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s campaigns in recent days
appear
to be taking precedence over policy with Election Day in just six weeks.
“When
African-Americans came here in 1619 … they could not be citizens,” Democratic
vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine told “Fox News Sunday.” “So for five-years
when Donald Trump has pushed this bigoted lie that the African American
president of the United States is not a U.S. citizen, so many people connect
that to the most painful time in American history.”
To be sure, Trump,
the Republican presidential nominee and first-time candidate, was for years at
the forefront of the so-called “birther movement,” which argued Obama was born
in Kenya, therefore not a U.S. citizen.
The debate faded in
2011 when Obama made public a birth certificate document from Hawaii. However,
the issue resurface last week when Trump stalled for days about whether Obama
was indeed a citizen, saying Friday that Obama indeed was but blaming
associates of the Clinton campaign for starting the so-called “birther” issue.
On Sunday, Trump
campaign manager Kellyanne Conway seemed to prolong the issue, or at least part
of it, when she continued to argue the issue started with people connected to
the Clinton campaign, in its hard-fought 2008 Democratic presidential primary
with Obama.
“It was used as a
smear against Senator Obama by Clinton campaign associates, and by the way, not
a bunch of summer interns who just got it all wrong and were a little bit too
ambitious,” Conway told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “These were chief strategists,
pollsters, long-term confidants who were pushing this.”
The race between
Trump and Clinton, the Democrat nominee, has tightened in recent weeks, after a
series of Trump missteps in August resulted in a drop in polls numbers that
some political analysts suggested were insurmountable.
Trump during that
time was critical of a Muslim woman whose son, an Army captain, was killed in
Iraq. The woman, Ghazala Khan, stood silently on the Democratic National
Convention stage while her husband attacked Trump.
But most polls now
show Trump having closed Clinton’s single-digit lead.
A Fox News poll
released Thursday shows him trailing Clinton by just 1 percentage point among
likely voters in a four-way ballot. Clinton receives 41 percent and Trump 40
percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson at 8 percent and Green Party candidate
Jill Stein at 3 percent.
In the head-to-head
matchup with Clinton, Trump leads up by 1 percentage point.
Clinton, a former
first lady and New York senator, has struggled from nearly the start of her
2016 White House bid to gain voters’ trust, in large part over revelations she
used a private server system as secretary of state to send and receive official
emails.
And an FBI
investigation into the matter found at least parts of several of the emails
contained classified information.
Her campaign has
also be dragged down by emails that suggest staffers at her family’s Clinton
Foundation were seeking favors at the Clinton-run State Department for
high-dollar donors and Clinton saying in recent days that half of Trump
supporters are “deplorables.”
A poll released in
July by the nonpartisan Gallup firm found “Trump and Clinton are currently
among the worst-rated presidential candidates of the last seven decades.”
The poll found
Trump’s “highly unfavorable” score was 42 percent, compared to 33 for Clinton.
It also noted that 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater previously had the
highest negative score -- 26 percent.
“We have a candidate
who clearly represents the unpopular policies and unpopular themes of the last
eight years as well as the old policies from the 1990s,” public affair
consultant Tony Reiss told FoxNews.com on Sunday. “On the other side, we have
Donald Trump, a candidate who is tapping into the frustration that most
Americans feel toward politicians right now. … As Trump continues to roll out
his agenda and rise in the polls … we’ll see further negativity come from the
Clinton campaign and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Trump responds in-kind.”
Conway also said
Sunday that Trump is “moving on to all the things he talked about (last) week”
including tax reform and child care tax credits.
“Donald Trump has
talked about every policy issue that there is,” she continued. “We have a few
more to go.”
Trump indeed gave a
significant policy speech last week on improving child care in the United
States, in large part through rewriting the tax code, including allowing
parents to deduct such expenses. He also proposed six weeks of paid maternity
leave to companies and employers that don’t offer maternity leave. Clinton laid
out her plan earlier in the campaign.
“We’re in the final
weeks of a campaign and both candidates will do whatever they think is going to
move the needle in their favor,” Reiss said. “Personal attacks, policy attacks
or harsh contrasting, at this stage in the campaign nothing is off the table.”
Fox News
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