Florida GOP phone bank volunteer: Obama a 'socialist Muslim'

Orange Park - A Florida woman working as a phone bank volunteer for the Republican Party was inadvertently recorded telling senior citizens that President Barack Obama was a "Muslim" who would "get rid of Medicare" and turn American into a "socialistic" country.

WMNF first played the audio recording of the Clay County Republican Party volunteer, whose fallacious pitch was captured by the answering machine in a home previously called by the same volunteer. "Y'all sound like y'all are senior citizens, right?" the caller asks. "You don't want Obama. You really don't want Obama," she continues. Why not? "He will get rid of your Medicare. You might as well say goodbye to it," the woman says, her first lie of the call. "I don't know if you've done any research on Obama or not," she continues, "but he is a Muslim, he does got a socialistic view on the economy, the government, the whole nine yards." "If he had his way, we'd be a socialistic country," she asserts. The GOP volunteer then urged voters to "pay attention to Fox News" and watch Dinesh D'Souza's anti-Obama film "2016: Obama's America." Leslie Dougher, chair of the Clay County Republican Party, apologized for the call. "It was her own personalized-- she was a volunteer, and they come in, they are told to stick to the script. She did not," Dougher told WJXT. Tom Nazworth, chairman of the Clay County Democratic Party, told WJXT that his GOP counterpart should resign over the incident. "They should monitor everything," Nazworth said. "We monitor people when they make phone calls. They would have been asked to leave our headquarters." The Florida incident follows news that a million swing-state voters were mailed a DVD claiming that President Obama's mother appeared nude in pornographic magazines while she was pregnant with Barack and that the president's real father was not a Kenyan student, but rather the leftist poet and labor activist Frank Marshall Davis. Although Obama is neither a Muslim nor a socialist, notions that he is one, the other or both stubbornly persist among conservative Americans. In fact, a Public Policy Polling survey of likely voters in Mississippi's March 2012 Republican primary election found that the majority-- 52 percent-- thought Obama was a Muslim. Only 12 percent said he was a Christian. In neighboring Alabama, fully 45 percent of polled GOP primary voters said Obama was a Muslim.