The Huffington Post
President Barack Obama told The Des Moines Register on Tuesday that there was a strong possibility that he’d win a second term because of the extent to which Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had alienated Hispanic voters.
“Since this is off the record, I will just be very blunt,” Obama said on a call Tuesday with the Register’s publisher and editor, which was originally meant to be off the record. “Should I win a second term, a big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.”
The statement was part of an interview that the White House never intended to go public. The president talked to the editors at the Register on condition that the conversation be kept off the record. The paper complained, asking for some explanation for why they couldn’t print what the president had said (the campaign said it was the White House’s call). The paper ended up taking their complaints public in a blistering blog post on Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, the Obama campaign relented.
