Obama in joking mood in Florida

FLORIDA: President Barack Obama was winning laughs at a packed restaurant on the campaign trail Saturday, where he was introduced to a boy born in his home state, Hawaii.

At a bustling eatery Gator’s Dockside, the incumbent president sidled up to a table of 10 people including five children, at which a woman signaled to Obama that one youngster was born in Hawaii. “You were born in Hawaii? You have a birth certificate?” Obama joked to the boy, whose table burst into laughter.

The US president long has been a target of “birther” theorists who have suggested his Hawaii birth certificate was a fake, and he was perhaps ineligible for high office.

Obama took his case Saturday to the most contested part of the biggest swing state, Florida, and told 11,000 people in St Petersburg, “you’ve got a big choice to make” ayhead of the November 6 election against Republican Mitt Romney.

Obama planned to meet with supporters in Melbourne and West Palm Beach as he pursued his strategy of winning over undecided voters in so-called battleground or swing states.

Florida, where the president will be spending his second day, is one of 12 such states, which don’t have a pronounced political preference and whose voters will likely determine the outcome of the November 6 election.

AFP