Politics

Jeb Bush is fond of pointing out that the number of people in poverty has gone up by 6 million since President Obama took office. He brought up the figure in the GOP debate, and he repeats it often on the campaign trail. It’s not a new criticism — Mitt Romney hurled similar criticisms at Obama in the 2012 campaign.

By their very nature, talking points get repeated over and over in campaigns, so get ready to hear this one a lot in the run-up to the 2016 primaries. But meantime, here’s a look at what Bush is saying: Is it true? And if so, does it mean Obama has failed America’s poor?

The numbers

Bush is right, if you allow him a little bit of creative rounding. The most recent official count from the Census Bureau put the number of Americans in poverty at 45.3 million as of 2013 (the most recent year for which the census has measured poverty). That’s not quite 5.5 million more people in poverty than there were in 2008, just before Obama took office. So there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 million more people in poverty now than there were before Obama took office.

Of course, the number that makes more sense to compare is the poverty rate — after all, while the number of Americans in poverty has grown, so has the total number of Americans. Even then, the numbers aren’t in President Obama’s favor — 13.2 percent of Americans were in poverty in 2008. As of 2013, it was 14.5 percent.

Still, it’s worth pointing out that the number of Americans in poverty fell substantially between 2012 and 2013 — by nearly 1.2 million. The poverty rate is also falling. The latest figure — 14.5 percent in 2013 — was down from 15.1 percent in 2010. The next poverty estimates from the Census Bureau will be out in September. If poverty continued its decline last year, Bush will have to change his numbers.

Was it Obama’s fault?

Bush is mostly right on the numbers, but he’s also clearly implying that President Obama is responsible for the increased number of Americans in poverty.

That’s a tough case to make. Poverty was already on the upswing when Obama took office as the economy hurtled toward recession. Before George W. Bush took office, the poverty rate was 11.3 percent. When he left, it was 14.3 percent. So it’s not as if Obama interrupted a rapidly improving poverty rate. In fact, as stated above, the trajectory of poverty has turned around under Obama, and it now appears to be falling.

But still. Poverty did grow under Obama. So what did he do about it? He expanded a lot of programs that most directly affect the poorest Americans’ lives, and, according to one expert, he did an admirable job.

“Obama did a good job in a really tough situation. Poverty would have increased a lot more without what he did,” says Timothy Smeeding, professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and former director of that school’s Institute for Research on Poverty. “The American Recovery and Relief Act [more commonly known as the 2009 stimulus] did a great job helping our bottom end [of earners].”

The recession caused the big upswing in poverty under Obama, and the $830 billion stimulus package was his biggest effort to stop the economy’s freefall. That’s maybe the best place to examine his anti-poverty efforts.

For one thing, the stimulus package created millions of jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly found that the package created millions of jobs, saving people from unemployment — even today, there’s still a small boost from the 2009 stimulus package. Not only that, but top economists agreed in a 2014 survey that the benefits of the stimulus outweighed the costs.

That law didn’t make up for all of the jobs lost in the recession, but it did soften the blow and keep people from going without work … which would have easily put them into poverty.

Moreover, the stimulus package also expanded lots of programs that disproportionately help lower earners: the earned income tax credit, unemployment insurance, SNAP (also known as food stamps).

Digression: Our definition of “poverty” is pretty awful

Several social safety net programs paid out more benefits as a result of the stimulus, but they didn’t all help improve the poverty rate. That’s because the formula that determines who is in poverty only takes certain programs into account.

Income from unemployment and Social Security, for example, counts toward bringing a person over the poverty line. SNAP and EITC, however — despite giving people tax breaks and money for food — have no effect on the poverty rate. So even if Obama and Congress decided in the stimulus package to give all low-income Americans $200 extra per month for groceries, those people would still be in poverty. But if that same money went to, say, unemployed people, some of those people would be lifted out of poverty.

This is just one way that the poverty rate is a truly terrible indicator, with a formula that today looks pretty arbitrary, as it’s based on the cost of food in 1963. For your throwback early-00s thrill of the day, here’s a banter-riffic West Wing explanation:

So even though lots of Obama’s policies may have been aimed at the poor, they didn’t improve the poverty rate itself.

But seriously, how did Obama’s policies affect poverty?

Clearly, many of his policies targeted the lowest-income Americans, and there’s evidence that he succeeded in helping a lot of people. As the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found in a 2009 analysis, the stimulus at the time was responsible for keeping 6 million people out of poverty and improved the fortunes of 33 million more.

But then, poverty is still high — 14.5 percent — compared to its recent low of 11.3 percent in 2000. Not only that, but even if you use the supplemental poverty measure — an alternative (read: more logical) poverty metric that takes programs like SNAP and EITC into account — the poverty rate is still up over the Obama presidency.

So Obama’s recession-era policies made life better for America’s poor and prevented poverty from growing even more than it did, but poverty still is a big problem in America.

So could he have done more?

Lots of people argue that he could have done more, but arguably, there wasn’t the political will — from the White House or from Congress — to actually pass those policies.

On the one hand, there’s the argument that he could have amped up his policies to alleviate poverty even more. Many have argued (including Nobel winner Paul Krugman and former President Bill Clinton, for example) that the stimulus wasn’t big enough — Obama adviser Christina Romer in fact initially estimated the bill should be worth $1.2 trillion. But of course, getting even $800 billion in stimulus funds through Congress was hard enough.

Beyond that, Obama’s record is mixed. For example, early in 2014, he signed nearly $9 billion in cuts to the SNAP program into law, a move that angered some congressional Democrats.

But then, he has called for universal pre-K education — a program that wouldn’t immediately reduce poverty but could set poor kids up to keep pace with their richer peers in the future. However, that proposal has gone nowhere in the years since he introduced it.

A higher minimum wage could likewise boost some people out of poverty, but many in Congress oppose raising the wage floor out of concern it will cost jobs.

“I would say it’s accurate that not much has been done under Obama to reduce poverty except during the recession, but he tried some things that did not pass,” says Ron Haskins, senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. (Haskins adds, however, that Obama “did a tremendous amount during the recession, and it was effective.”)

Republicans, meanwhile, have had their own ideas about how to fight poverty. Most notably, Rep. Paul Ryan released a poverty-fighting plan in 2014, but it relied on ideas that tend to be nonstarters among Democrats, like block granting food stamps and welfare.

Part of the problem is that reasonable people can (and do) disagree about the best way to bring poverty down. You could alter existing anti-poverty programs to incentivize work, for example. Or you could make those programs more generous. (Or both.)

There are a few policies that have at least some small hope of passing — expanding the EITC for childless workers is one proposal with some bipartisan support. Though it wouldn’t directly bring the poverty rate down, the EITC could incentivize work, which could help shrink poverty.

Likewise, there was some bipartisan support for a bill to encourage employers to hire the long-term unemployed, which could have also helped low-income Americans. But that bill, like many others in the past few sessions of congress, never made it far.

The point is that plenty more could have been done to help low-income Americans during the Obama presidency. But that would require Obama and Congress agreeing on policy. That kind of agreement rarely happens these days.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Alaskans voted in 1998 to define marriage in the state constitution as only between a man and a woman. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated that definition, Alaska and the entire country has marriage equality.

To some it may seem like things are changing fast, but Alaska’s fight for gay rights began half a lifetime ago.

In the course of Alaska’s legislative history, there have been six bills to outlaw sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. In Anchorage, there have been at least three ordinances.

They’ve all failed.

The fight may have begun in 1975, when the Alaska State Human Rights Commission took a formal stance that sexual preference should be included in the state’s non-discrimination policy.

House Bill 125 was introduced in 1987, during the AIDS epidemic. The commission director, the attorney general and the governor all supported the bill.

“[It was] just something that seemed to me, it was time to make some noise about it,” says former Democratic Gov. Steve Cowper.

He introduced the bill less than two months after taking office. He had served in the Vietnam War and made a friend who was gay.

“They served just as well or better than other people,” Cowper said.

Cowper can’t remember why exactly he introduced the bill, but cites that personal experience as a possible reason. Old files also suggest commission Director Janet Bradley asked for his support.

“But as a general principle, people shouldn’t be discriminated against any more than you should be able to discriminate for racial reasons,” Cowper said.

Cowper’s friend died from AIDS years later. HB 125 never made it out of committee.

Janet Bradley left the Human Rights Commission in 1988. During the last decade of her career, she had taken an aggressive approach to more inclusive legislation.

After she left, Paula Haley became the commission’s director. She’s still the director now and she hasn’t touched the issue.

In 1989 through an LGBT advocacy group, researchers Melissa Green and Jay Brause published a statewide survey documenting the experiences of Alaska’s lesbian and gay community, including issues of discrimination and health.

Janet Bradley ended the report’s forward with a call to action: “This report then becomes our challenge; for if we believe that our vision of Alaska is marred when discrimination exists, we must commit ourselves to eliminating sexual orientation discrimination.”

In 2012, Green published her final report on a survey on LGBT discrimination in Anchorage through Identity, Inc. It was a few weeks before Anchorage voted on Proposition 5, a sexual identity anti-discrimination measure that failed. She says the report received a lot of criticism.

“It has important things to say. I hope that people might still read it, but I’m done. I’m done. I’m off on my own life,” Green said.

She’s burnt out and says she’s kind of bitter.

“It ate up a lot of my life and a lot of my time, and it had, I wouldn’t say exactly zero impact, but pretty close to that,” Green said. “Nobody really cared— outside of the [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] community, nobody really cared.”

In 1986, the Anchorage Daily News interviewed a gay man working at Identity, Inc., an advocacy organization. He was collecting violent and homophobic voice mail the office received for a research report on gay and lesbian discrimination.

That man’s name was Jay Brause.

“Through the AIDS crisis we started finding out how important our relationships were,” Brause said.

“We started finding out we had no rights. We were denied in so many ways.” Brause said.

He said he knew of couples who’d been together for decades and if one of them would become ill or die, often their relationship meant nothing when it came to hospital visitation, burials, military honors and home ownership.

“How do you explain that to people? It’s a potent, virulent form of discrimination,” Brause said.

During the same year the ADN published the story, he interned with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in D.C.

Brause and his now-husband Gene Dugan applied for their marriage license in 1994. The controversial act eventually led to the 1998 constitutional amendment defining marriage.

He paid for being a prominent gay figure in the 80s and 90s in more ways.

“I felt the prejudice and the discrimination very personally and directly. In a way, you don’t know if you’re hiding or you haven’t disclosed (your sexuality),” Brause said.

Like his friend Melissa Green, he’s disillusioned about his fight and American liberties. His reaction when Alaska got marriage equality?

“I did not have the person-in-the-street’s reaction. No, not even a smile,” Brause said.

In 2006, he and his husband moved to England, where he has dual-citizenship. In September, he’ll travel back to Anchorage to clean up to the last few bits of his life in America before leaving for good.

“Thank you to every single one of us who took on that work as activists, who took chances to make a difference, and believe me, there’s more to be done.”

State Legislative Reference Librarian Jennifer Fletcher researched legislative files. This article could not be produced without her assistance.

Editor’s note: This story and audio have been updated. The number of Anchorage anti-discrimination ordinances that have failed has been qualified; there have been at least three. Also, Identity, Inc. published all three reports. Jay Brause and Identity, Inc. volunteers authored One in Ten, Brause and Melissa Green authored Identity Reports, and Green authored the LGBT Anchorage Discrimination survey report. Volunteers and community members assisted with all three of the studies. 

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Bibliography 

1975-76, Senate Bill 60, (Files 1, 2, 3, senate floor tape)

1983-84, House Bill 364 (File 1)

1983-84, Senate Bill 406 (Files 1, 2)

1983-84, Senate Bill 77 (Files 1, 2)

1985-86 House Bill 194 (Files 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

1987-88, House Bill 125 (Files 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

The Alaska Gay and Lesbian Community Center

“One in Ten,” report published by Identity, Inc.

“Sexual Orientation Bias in Alaska,” published by Identity, Inc. 

Jay Brause & Gene Dugan v. Alaska Dept. of Health and Social Services

1998 Alaska Ballot Measure 2

Jerry Prevo,  June 6, 2009 sermon against Anchorage Ordinance 64

Jerry Prevo, March 25, 2012 sermon against transgender rights and Prop. 5

Identity, Inc.’s flag burns, article by Alaska Dispatch News

U.S. EEOC, July 2015 ruling on sexual orientation discrimination

U.S. EEOC rulings on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination

Anchorage Municipal Mayor Ethan Berkotwitz’s 2015 transition report

Aug. 12, 2005 interview with Gov. Bill Walker

2015 Anchorage Ordinance on city’s non-discrimination policy

Gov. Bill Walker hosted his first Governor’s Picnic in Juneau on Friday at the University of Alaska Southeast. While serving up hot dogs and salmon, I asked picnic-goers what they’d do as governor for the day.

The community lined up on a warm, sunny afternoon to mingle with state officials but also for the free food: hot dogs, salmon, and locally made ice cream. Gov. Walker was dressed for the occasion.

“Well, I’m wearing my cook outfit. My apron. My governor’s picnic apron and it’s the third time I’ve worn this outfit,” he says.

He says it can be tough doing double duty: serving the public fillets of fish and being a politician.

“My problem is this: I like to shake hands and say hello to people and I have to wear a plastic glove and then I have to take it back off, put it back on, take it back on,” Walker says.

Brenda Calkins and her daughter are waiting in line. They’re inching closer to the governor but not sure what they’ll say as he serves them a piece of salmon.

“Yeah, I don’t know if I have anything. … I might have to think up a question in, like two seconds,” Calkins says.

In years past, the governor’s picnic has been held at Sandy Beach. This year, it’s on the UAS campus to highlight education and kids activities.

A fire truck is parked nearby for children to hop aboard. And like the food, there’s a line for that, too. Volunteer firefighter Steven Anderson is making sure everything runs smoothly.

“I’ve been doing this about five years. As much as I can I come out to the community events,” Anderson says.

What would he do if he was governor for the day?

“I don’t know much about politics and I don’t think I could change much for a day. I’d be kickin’ back in the mansion,” he says.

After thinking a few seconds, he says he’d work on increasing the budget for firefighting.

The Thunder Mountain High School football team also helped out at the event.

“Just kind of picking up trash, handing out fliers and at one point we were helping people find a place to park,” says left tackle Josh Quinto.

He has his own ideas about what he’d do if he were governor–more community events.

“I think at most, maybe throw a big party. I’d have different music everyday. Maybe some rock, country occasionally. So random stuff like Fall Out Boy or Nickelback, I guess,” Quinto says. “Definitely not the same food. Maybe something other than salmon, I don’t know like halibut. Fish and chips, those are always good.”

Picnic-goers lounge on a half-moon concrete bench, scraping food off paper plates and watching people play corn hole.

Andualem Fanta is watching the fun. He travels for work with Delta Airlines.

“I am originally from Ethiopia so I migrated to U.S. I lived in different state. But this my first time the governor invited everybody and having a good time,” Fanta says.

What would he do as governor?

“If I’m a governor, today? Serve the people like this. It could be a great opportunity to show you care about the people,” Fanta says.

From everyone, there was a variety of responses from dog racing, building a pipeline and making it permanently sunny in Juneau.

Brenda Calkins and her daughter make it through the end of the food line. Unfortunately, Gov. Walker ducked out for a photo-op with a costumed bear but first lady Donna Walker is still there.

“I didn’t know it was the first lady,” Calkins says with a laugh.

Which is what the Governor’s Picnic is all about. Getting to know your officials.

Born 223 years ago on Aug. 4, the great Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is celebrated for such works as his sublime odes to the skylark and West Wind. But he was also a radical thinker — and his revolutionary politics stormed in his teacup.

Slender of build and Spartan in habit, the tall, fair-haired poet had no taste for rich foods or wine. A vegetarian who shuddered at animal slaughter — though there were lapses into muttonchops and bacon — Shelley was an indifferent eater. He would absently spoon congealed food down his throat while his bright blue eyes devoured Aeschylus or Plutarch, whose essays on vegetarianism he translated.

But the one beverage to which he was addicted was tea.

His appetite for tea was limitless. Presumably, Shelley would have loved to load his cup with sugar — he had a strong sweet tooth. Except that in his lifetime, sugar came to epitomize the evils of slavery. In the liberal circles Shelley moved in, eating sugar was about as acceptable as displaying tusks of ivory in one’s living room is today.

In 1791, the year before Shelley was born, the abolitionist William Fox published his anti-sugar pamphlet, which called for a boycott of sugar grown by slaves working in inhuman conditions in the British-governed West Indies. “In every pound of sugar used, we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh,” wrote Fox. So powerful was his appeal that close to 400,000 Britons gave up sugar.

The sugar boycott squarely affected that most beloved of English rituals: afternoon tea. As The Salt has reported, sugar was an integral reason why tea became an engrained habit of the British in the 1700s. But with the sugar boycott, offering or not offering sugar with tea became a highly political act.

Soon, grocers stopped selling West Indies sugar and began to sell “East Indies sugar” from India. Those who bought this sugar were careful to broadcast their virtue by serving it in bowls imprinted with the words “not made by slave labor,” in much the same way that coffee today is advertised as fair-trade, or eggs as free-range.

Leading the boycott were the Romantic poets Coleridge and Shelley’s early hero, Robert Southey, who described tea as a “blood-sweeten’d beverage” produced under the “mangling scourge” of the trader’s whip. Shelley used these very words in his first long poem, Queen Mab, to evoke plantation slaves toiling “to the sound of the flesh-mangling scourge” to produce “all-polluting luxury and wealth.”

Both Shelley and his second wife, Mary, abstained from sugar and drank green tea instead. According to Mary Shelley’s biographer Miranda Seymour, the lonely and misunderstood monster in Mary’s 1818 masterpiece, Frankenstein, is based on the African slaves she saw being worked at the quays in Bristol, a major slave port at the time. Mary’s father, William Godwin — a radical socialist philosopher at the forefront of the antislavery movement, and Shelley’s mentor — enjoyed a strong smoky green tea known as Gunpowder.

Still, even Shelley’s high-minded avoidance of sugar had its limits. This, after all, was a man who liked to lick honey straight from the honeycomb. As his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, wrote, Shelley “would greedily eat cakes, gingerbread, and sugar.” And at Oxford, at least, Shelley took his tea with sugar.

For the most part, though, the poet seems to have maneuvered around the need for the sweet stuff in his cup by drinking only the best, most expensive green tea. Though barely a step ahead of the debt collector, he insisted on having the finest tea shipped to Italy when he and Mary moved there for the last four years of his life. It was, Mary explained, a necessity, as “Townley tea” — a common brand — “was tried and found wanting.”

What else would one expect of Shelley? He was, after all, born an aristocrat. His radical politics caused his estrangement from his wealthy family, but they did not strip him of his taste for good tea. Indeed, the man who got kicked out of Oxford for writing a pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism” liked to joke that he was actually a “théist” — by which he meant, a devotee of tea.

That devotion never wavered. Though doctors of the age cautioned against excessive drinking of stimulants like tea and coffee, Shelley — in his usual rebel manner — sneered at their counsel. A couple of years before his death, he wrote:

“The liquor doctors rail at—and which I
Will quaff in spite of them—and when we die
We’ll toss up who died first of drinking tea,
And cry out,—’Heads or tails?’ where’er we be.”

Afternoon tea didn’t kill Shelley — an afternoon storm did. A month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy.

Nina Martyris is a freelance journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A bill to defund Planned Parenthood failed a procedural vote in the U.S. Senate today. Sen. Dan Sullivan is a co-sponsor. Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted to advance the defunding measure also, but she says she doesn’t want to see Planned Parenthood’s funding removed without an investigation.

“A move to wholesale defund Planned Parenthood is just not smart,” she said just outside the Senate chamber after a procedural vote on the defunding bill.

Murkowski says she wanted the bill to advance so she could vote for an amendment offered by Republican moderates Susan Collins of Maine and Mark Kirk of Illinois. That measure would have required the Justice Department to investigate whether Planned Parenthood or its affiliates violated federal law regarding the harvest of fetal tissue. The Collins-Kirk measure would have cut off funding just to the facilities, if any, that profited from that practice. (Today’s procedural vote split Collins and Kirk. Collins voted to advance the defunding bill with hopes of amending it. Kirk was the only Republican to vote against advancing the bill.)

The reasons Murkowski is giving for her vote are nuanced and likely to be lost in the heated debate. After the vote, the Alaska Democratic Party issued a statement headlined “Murkowski Abandons Alaska Women.” On the other side, Jim Minnery of Alaska Family Action, has been urging his anti-abortion followers to tell Murkowski to support the bill.

Murkowski, who is up for re-election next year, has had a complex stand on abortion and women’s health issues since her days in the Alaska Legislature, and she has alternately pleased and angered both sides of the abortion debate.

Murkowski says she knows people will read a lot of meaning into today’s vote. She says she believes Planned Parenthood does good work and she notes that it provides health care to 21,000 Alaskans.

“What I’m opposed to is any measure that would completely defund … important services to men and women.  Unless, unless there has been illegal action,” she said. “And we don’t know if there has been.”

She says she was repulsed by the videos taken by anti-abortion activists in which Planned Parenthood officials seem to discuss compensation for providing fetal tissue for research and methods of collection. Murkowski today asked the U.S. attorney general for an investigation.

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said over the weekend that President Obama’s Iran deal is so bad it will “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”

Candidates, politicians and groups were quick to denounce — or defend — the Holocaust reference.

Here’s Huckabee’s full quote, said in an interview with Breitbart News‘ editor-in-chief, Alexander Marlow, on Saturday:

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people. I read the whole deal. We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.”

President Obama hit back at Huckabee during a press conference in Ethiopia, calling his comments “part of just a general pattern that we’ve seen that would be considered ridiculous if it weren’t so sad.”

The president spoke about what he called a “general pattern” of rhetoric on the Republican side — most notably in the controversial comments made on the trail by Donald Trump.

“We just don’t fling out ad hominem attacks like that, because it doesn’t help inform the American people,” the president said. “Maybe this is just an effort to push Mr. Trump out of the headlines, but it’s not the kind of leadership that is needed for America right now.”

Huckabee defended what he said Monday, releasing a statement and tweeting, “For decades, Iranian leaders have pledged to ‘destroy,’ ‘annihilate,’ and ‘wipe Israel off the map’ with a ‘big Holocaust.’ ”

Trump’s special counsel Michael Cohen said Monday he doesn’t think Trump is offended by Huckabee’s comments. Cohen, who said his father is a Holocaust survivor, told CNN, “We’ve been there. … I can tell you — there’s that old statement, ‘Never again.’ What Trump is trying to say is a nuclear Iran is the destruction of this world. What we need is a strong America.”

He added, “I’m not offended by the words. What I am is I’m concerned. I’m truly concerned for the safety of not just this country but the countries all around the world.”

Former New York Gov. George Pataki, who is also running on the Republican side, tweeted: “Agree with @Potus that @GovMikeHuckabee remarks are ‘sad,’ unfortunately, it comes from the most divisive President in history #OneAmerica.”

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton addressed the comment in Iowa Monday, saying, “I’m disappointed, and I’m really offended personally. … I find this kind of inflammatory rhetoric totally unacceptable.”

Maryland Democrat Martin O’Malley also called the comments “offensive.”

Jewish Groups Speak Out

Advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement, “Whatever one’s views of the nuclear agreement with Iran … comments such as those by Mike Huckabee suggesting the president is leading Israel to another Holocaust are completely out of line and unacceptable.”

The National Jewish Democratic Council said Huckabee’s remarks “may be the most inexcusable we’ve encountered in recent memory” and called on the Republican candidates to denounce them:

“Republicans have fallen over themselves to speak out against Donald Trump’s outrageous rhetoric on immigration and veterans. Will they now do the same and speak out against this unacceptable attack against President Obama that smears the memory of Holocaust victims, as they did when Trump attacked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)? Or will they stand by in silence and implicit approval? We call on every candidate to condemn Gov. Huckabee’s disgusting statement and to show where they truly stand.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called Huckabee’s language “very harsh” and “over the top,” though he also called the governor “a great supporter of Israel.”

Asked by CNN if he had advice for Huckabee, the rabbi answered, “I would advise that no president of the United States should be compared in any way to Adolf Hitler.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.