Former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu, a prominent surrogate for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, said President Obama doesn’t understand “how the American system functions” because “he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something.”
“He has no idea how the American system functions, and we shouldn’t be surprised about that, because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, and spent the next set of years in Indonesia,” Sununu told Fox News on Tuesday. “And frankly, when he came to the U.S. he worked as a community organizer, which is a socialized structure, and then got into politics in Chicago. There has been no experience in his life in which he has earned a private sector paycheck that meant anything.”
In his 1995 memoir,
Dreams from My Father, Obama admitted to smoking marijuana as a youth, and a recent biography by David Maraniss,
Barack Obama: The Story, further explored the president’s pot-smoking days.
In his Fox News interview on Tuesday, Sununu ripped Obama for his comments over the weekend that all successful business owners received help from someone else along the way.
"The important thing about what the president said again, he believes it — and the fact that he believes it shows that the guy doesn’t understand how to create jobs,” Sununu said. “So there’s no surprise, and there shouldn’t be because of that statement, no surprise about why he failed so miserably over the last four years in terms of job creation."
Sununu, who also served as White House chief of staff under former President George H.W. Bush, has been one of the Romney campaign’s most aggressive surrogates.
In an interview last week, Sununu said Obama must be “dumb” for his campaign to insinuate that Romney might have committed a felony by signing regulatory documents identifying himself as Bain Capital’s CEO and chairman for three years after he said he left the firm.
