Obama terms his remark on Hillary's ties with India ''stupid''

Washington, June 19 (UNI) Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama termed his campaign's memo implying that rival Hillary Clinton's ties with India made her fit to represent that south Asian nation "stupid" and "caustic" Obama also said, "I take responsibility for it, as does our campaign and we quickly apologized and are communicating that in various circles around the country." "It was a screw-up on the part of our research team," Obama, a US senator from Illinois, said during a meeting today with Des Moines Register editors and reporters. "It wasn't anything I had seen or my senior staff had seen." For the first time in public Obama had made remarks about a research document circulated last week by his campaign referring to Clinton as "D-Punjab," a pun on journalistic shorthand meant to suggest the senator from New York as a Democrat representing the state of Punjab in India.

The memo, obtained by the Clinton campaign, referred to Clinton's investments in Indian companies and efforts to raise money from members of the Indian-American community. One of the documents included the claim that former President Bill Clinton had accepted 300,000 dollars in speaking fees from Cisco Systems, a company Obama's campaign said has moved American jobs to India.

No sooner were Obama's campaign documents made public, several Indian American organizations took up the issue with the Senator from Illinois and asked him to apologize to the vast Indian American community living in the US. They complained about the "anti-Indian-American stereotyping" in the documents.

The Obama campaign document also referred to Clinton's speech to an Indian-American audience in March in which she said, "I can certainly run for the Senate seat in Punjab and win easily." Clarifying how his campaign team had messed up things, the Democratic presidential candidate regretted that "That particular quote was a joke, I think, that Hillary Clinton made to an Indian-American audience.

The research team thought it would be clever to put that at the top." Obama said "I thought it was stupid and caustic and not only didn't reflect my view of the complicated issue of outsourcing ...

it also didn't reflect the fact that I have longstanding support and friendships within the Indian-American community." Under a flippant headline referring to "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)," another campaign memo reported that Bill Clinton collected 300,000 dollars for two speeches from Cisco in 2006 and Hillary accepted almost 60,000 dollars in contributions from Cisco employees, even though the company was outsourcing jobs to India.

Later, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said in a statement that "Barack Obama has been a longtime friend of the Indian-American community and our campaign is fortunate to have strong support from Indian-Americans across the country. The intent of the document was to discuss the issue of outsourcing, but we regret the tone that parts of the document took." Meanwhile, reacting to the controversy by Obama campaign about a fund raising event Dr Rajwant Singh of SCORE, "Counselors to America's Small Business said he was extremely disappointed that the Illinois senator's team chose to attack Senator Clinton's ties with the Indian-American community. He said it was good-humoured comment that Hillary Clinton made in reference to her connection with Punjab and to convert it to portray her in a negative way was totally "unacceptable, " he added.

It was at Dr Rajwant Singh's residence that a fundraiser for Senator Clinton was made and it was there in March 2006 that she began her speech joking that she can certainly run for the Senate seat in Punjab and win easily.

Dr Singh said, "it was was a light-hearted remark that Senator Clinton made while addressing a gathering of mostly Indians from Punjab, a state in India. The comment was made in appreciation of Senator Clinton's popularity within India as well as in New York and her role in bringing the two nations closer. She had extended her strong support for the Sikhs and all South Asians in the aftermath of 9/11 tragedy when they had become target of hate crimes.

To portray this benign comment and blow it up into an insensitive attack tactic against a political opponent by the Obama's campaign is shocking," he said in a statement here today.

UNI