On visit to U.S., Britain's Farage criticizes Obama and Republicans

[February 27, 2015]  By Andy Sullivan
 
 NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. (Reuters) - U.K. Independence Party head Nigel Farage criticized both U.S. President Barack Obama and the opposition Republican Party on Thursday as he sought to build solidarity with fellow conservatives on a visit to the United States.

Speaking to an audience of conservative activists outside Washington, the anti-E.U. politician criticized Obama for not doing enough to fight Islamic State and other extremist groups.

"I see an American president who doesn't actually have the courage to address the essential issues of why those three people were arrested on the streets of New York yesterday," he said, referring to three Brooklyn men who were charged on Wednesday with trying to aid Islamic State.

He also said Republicans were doing a poor job of appealing to the type of working-class voters who abandoned the Democratic Party to help Ronald Reagan win the U.S. presidency in 1980 and 1984.

"Do you remember the Reagan Democrats?" Farage asked at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which has drawn more than a dozen potential Republican presidential candidates.

"I don't think at the moment the Republican Party is attracting those kinds of people," Farage said.

Farage may have broken an unwritten rule among politicians who avoid criticizing leaders of the countries they are visiting. For example, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a leading potential Republican presidential candidate, declined to comment on U.K. politics when he visited that country earlier this month and even refrained from criticizing Obama.

Campaigning on a platform of quitting the European Union and slashing immigration, Farage's UKIP is sometimes compared to the Tea Party movement that shook up the Republican Party.

UKIP won European elections in Britain last year and now poses a country-wide problem for Prime Minister David Cameron's center-right Conservative party ahead of a British election in May that is expected to be one of the closest in recent history.

Although UKIP is unlikely to win more than six of Britain's 650 parliamentary seats, polls show it is stealing more votes from the Conservatives than from their left-wing Labour opponents. With Conservative and Labour neck-and-neck in the same polls, the Prime Minister's party fears UKIP will split its vote and make it tougher for it to win outright.

The rise of UKIP put pressure on Cameron to pledge a national referendum on the country's EU membership by 2017.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Ken Wills)

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