On Monday, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal weighed in on an incident between Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and President Obama, saying it reminded him of a tense moment of his own with Mr. Obama.
Speaking on Fox News, the Louisiana Republican reflected on Mr. Obama’s visit to Louisiana during the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
“It was the president’s first visit after the oil spill,” Mr. Jindal said in the interview. “We were on the tarmac, he comes down there, obviously staged. They had already tipped off the Washington press corps to watch this interaction.”
“He was mad that he was going to look bad,” Mr. Jindal continued. “I was amazed by two things: One, that he was mad about the wrong things, and secondly, that he was so thin-skinned it was clearly a media stunt. Clearly a political stunt. May have tipped off a couple of Washington reporters to watch this interaction to get this picture. It was disappointing.”
The Louisiana Republican’s comment comes as Mr. Obama and Ms. Brewer reportedly exchanged a series of tense words during the president’s latest trip to Arizona. Ms. Brewer, an Arizona Republican,
Ms. Brewer, along with several other Arizona public officials, welcomed Mr. Obama on the tarmac as he stepped off of Air Force One. She was there to hand him a letter inviting him to tour the U.S.-Mexican border, but their conversation took a different turn.
The president was apparently not happy with a passage from Ms. Brewer’s recently published book “Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure the Border.”
The passage describes a meeting between the governor and the president in 2010 regarding a discussion of their differences regarding the tough illegal immigration law that she passed in the spring of 2010.
In the passage, Ms. Brewer described their conversation as the president lecturing her to the point that she was “like a child at his knee,” according to MSNBC.
After the incident, a photograph with the governor’s finger in the president’s face has circulated television and Internet news outlets. In the photo Ms. Brewer appears to be yelling at the president.
“I said to him that I have all the respect in the world for the office of the president,” Brewer said. “The book is what the book is. I asked him if he read the book. He said he read the excerpt.”
“He was a little disturbed about my book,” added Ms. Brewer. “He was a little thin-skinned.”
The Arizona governor also appeared on Fox News later in the day and reiterated her “thin-skinned” comment about the president.
