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Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush reacted Friday to the latest controversy roiling the GOP race by identifying President Barack Obama as “an American” and “Christian,” and calling for a return to civility in national politics.

Bush was alluding to an episode Thursday in which rival Donald Trump declined to correct a questioner who called Obama “Muslim” and “not even an American.”

Bush told roughly 2,000 Michigan Republican activists, “I will commit to you that I will never violate my conservative principles. But I will assume that someone that doesn’t agree with me isn’t a bad person.

“We need to begin to get back to that degree of civility before it’s too late in this country,” Bush said.

Bush, the lead speaker at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, said a Republican could carry Michigan in 2016 – for the first time since his father, George H.W. Bush, did it in 1988 – “if we run with heart”…

Read More: Jeb Bush: Obama Is ‘a Christian and an American’ – Breitbart