WASHINGTON — The heated debate over building a mosque at Ground Zero emerged as a national campaign issue yesterday as Republicans blasted President Obama for flip-flopping on the issue and being “disconnected from the mainstream of America.”
Republican strategist Ed Rollins said Obama’s mosque remarks were “the dumbest thing any president . . . or candidate has said since Michael Dukakis said it was OK to burn the flag.
“Intellectually, the president may be right, but this is an emotional issue, and people who lost kids, brothers, sisters, fathers, what have you, do not want that mosque in New York, and it’s going to be a big, big issue for Democrats across this country,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), said, “This is the dichotomy that people sense — that they’re being lectured to, not listened to.”
“The president himself seems to be disconnected from the mainstream of America . . . and that’s why Americans are frustrated,” Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Rep. Peter King (R-LI) ripped Obama for “trying to have it both ways.”
“You can’t go changing your position from day to day on an issue which does go to our Constitution — and it also goes to extreme sensitivities,” King said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
King said he agreed that Muslims have a legal right to build the proposed 13-story Islamic cultural center and mosque on Park Place, two blocks from the World Trade Center site.
But he said they should heed the widespread opposition.
“This is such a raw wound, and they’re just pouring salt into it,” King said.
On Friday, Obama told a group of Muslim Americans observing Ramadan at the White House that the mosque plans fit in with “our commitment to religious freedom.”
But the next day, Obama said he was not commenting on the “wisdom” of constructing a mosque at Ground Zero.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn) said Obama got it right on Friday.
“There’s no way for government to block this,” Nadler said on the CNN show.
“We do not put the Bill of Rights, we do not put religious freedom, to a vote,” he said. “I hope that people will understand that government has no role in this.”
A Fox News poll released Friday found that 61 percent of Americans think the Muslim group has the right to build the mosque but 64 percent think it would be wrong to put a mosque near Ground Zero.