Obama's going to Kenya – and some Republicans detect a hidden agenda

Tom McCarthy in New York
Monday 30 March 2015 21.20 BST

Republican senator Mitch McConnell warned Barack Obama a few months ago that acting on immigration reform would be “like waving a red flag in front of a bull”. Everybody believed him, because Republicans were fresh off a debt-reduction strategy nicknamed: “Hand it over – or the economy gets it”.

Now, a prominent Republican is second-guessing what may be Obama’s boldest provocation yet: visiting Kenya.

The White House announced on Monday that Obama would attend the 2015 global entrepreneurship summit that will take place in July in Kenya. It will be his first trip to Kenya as president. An official announcement with the anodyne title “Reinforcing the US-Africa partnership” trotted out various government-related excuses for why Obama, whose father was Kenyan, would make the trip.

But a former Republican governor saw an alternate explanation: Obama is “just inciting some chatter” on the question of where he was born.

“I think his trip back to Kenya is going to create a lot of chatter and commentary among some of the hard right who still don’t see him as having been born in the US,” John Sununu, who has a record of knocking Obama as un-American, told Fox News on Monday.

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