Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer and President Obama engaged in a heated exchange during Mr. Obama’s Wednesday trip to the state, according to various media reports.
Mr. Obama, traveled to Arizona as part of a three day tour that will feature stops in Iowa, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Colorado where he will reiterate his comments from the State of the Union address pushing for states to help strengthen the U.S. manufacturing industry.
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.
Their original disagreement in 2010 resulted after Governor Brewer signed the controversial “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” into law, which sparked protests around the country.
The law essentially requires immigrants to carry proof of legal residency at all times and originally allowed what the Obama administration considered to be racial profiling of immigrants. A federal judge blocked certain sections of the law, but did allow the passage of it after the Obama administration filed a lawsuit against the state in an attempt to block the passage of the law.
Following the passage and signing into law of the controversial immigration law, Mr. Obama invited the Arizona Republican to the White House, offering to explain his administration’s stance on the issue of immigration reform.
That lead to Ms. Brewer describing the situation in her book, which ultimately lead to their confrontation as the president exited Air Force One Wednesday.
In an interview in November Ms. Brewer described two tense meetings between her and the president, the first of which took place before his commencement address at Arizona State University.
“He did blow me off at ASU,” Ms. Brewer said at the time.
Ms. Brewer has repeatedly asked for the federal government’s help to secure Arizona’s border with Mexico, where drug wars have claimed more than 40,000 lives in recent years. Smugglers cross the Arizona border to bring their drugs — and their gang fights — into the state and onto the roads further north. The issue has taken root on Capitol Hill, where congressional lawmakers have spent the past several years battling over proposals from both sides of the aisle.
Following the incident on Wednesday, the White House released the following statement:
“The governor handed the president a letter and said she was inviting him to meet with her. The president said he’d be glad to meet with her again, but did note that after their last meeting, a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book.”
Mr. Obama has not publicly commented on the incident and is currently still in the midst of his three day tour.
