2nd Mayor Says Obama ‘Wasn’t Tense At All’ During Brewer Encounter

Out of the three officials who met President Obama on an airport tarmac near Phoenix earlier this week, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) is now the only one who has characterized the president as anything other than cordial.

In numerous TV and radio interviews since the meeting, Brewer has said the president was “tense to say the least” and took issue with a book she wrote last year. She said Obama walked away from her while she was in mid-sentence and even told one Phoenix television station she felt “a little bit threatened” by the encounter.

RELATED: Mayor Seems To Contradict Brewer’s Version Of Obama Run-In

But Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, who was standing just feet away from the president and the governor on Wednesday during their now-infamous encounter, told TPM that Obama seemed calm the whole time.

“He wasn’t tense at all,” Stanton said on Friday. “The guy’s a pro.”

Though Stanton declined to discuss exactly what the governor and president said to each other, he said Obama’s classic coolness was evident.

“He doesn’t get animated, but he looks you in the eye and tells you what he thinks,” Stanton said. “And I think that’s honestly what he did is he looked the governor in the eye and spoke and told her what he was really feeling.”

Stanton, a Democrat, is now the second elected Arizona official whose account of the incident contradicts the way Brewer has described it.

Talking Points Memo on Facebook

The other politician on hand to greet the president, Republican Mayor Scott Smith of Mesa, Ariz., told TPM on Thursday that the discussion between the president and governor was an “awkward moment” but little more than that.

Obama himself dismissed the incident in an interview with ABC News, calling it “a classic example of things getting blown out of proportion.”

But in one interview after another, Brewer has said she was “taken aback” by the way the president spoke to her. She has repeatedly mocked him as “thin skinned” for taking issue with a passage of her 2011 book “Scorpions for Breakfast.”

The White House confirmed that Obama talked about her book, saying he was disappointed that she described her June 2010 visit to the Oval Office in a bad light. She previously had called the meeting “very cordial” in public. But in the book, she blasted the president as “patronizing” and “condescending.”

On Wednesday, reporters witnessed the governor pointing her finger at the president and she appeared flustered after the encounter.

The Phoenix mayor echoed the sentiment of his Mesa counterpart, telling TPM he wished the small encounter didn’t overshadow the real reason for Obama’s visit, which was designed to highlight jobs and innovation.

“It’s unfortunate that that very positive, good message has been sort of lost in the way the media’s covered this personal interchange between the two,” Stanton said. “At the end of the day, it’s not that big of a deal. The president said it was overblown. I agree.”

Stanton said that kind of visit should be an honor for Arizona, not a partisan exercise.

“I’m mayor of every person in my city, Democrat, Republican, independent, whatever,” Stanton said. “You’re in your official capacity at that point. I’m an ambassador for the state at that moment.”

Brewer Has History Of Getting Facts Wrong

Back in 2010 as she defended her state’s harsh immigration law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) told a newspaper reporter that she was deeply hurt by the terrible names people were calling her. The worst, she said, were the comparisons to the Nazis.

“They are awful,” she said. “Knowing that my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany, that I lost him when I was 11 because of that…and then to have them call me Hitler’s daughter. It hurts. It’s ugliness beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.”

The problem, as many discovered after the quote went viral, was that it wasn’t true. Brewer’s father had in fact died of lung disease in California in 1955, a decade after WWII ended.

As Brewer now faces the fact that another one of her stories is coming under question, this one involving an encounter she had with President Obama, a pattern appears to emerging in her career: The popular conservative bomb thrower often has trouble with the truth.

The governor made the rounds on the cable news networks last week, talking about her run-in with the president on an airport tarmac near Phoenix.

Brewer called it a “tense” encounter in which Obama criticized her book and then walked away from her while she was in mid-sentence. But two other officials who witnessed the encounter said Obama was nothing but calm and described the event as little more than an “awkward moment.”

Still, the governor has used her version of the encounter to get plenty of air time, seeing an increase in sales of her book which she has called a “truth telling” tome. Amazon ranked “Scorpions for Breakfast” at No. 7 on its best sellers list on Friday. The day of the event, the book had been at No. 343,222.

On Friday, her spokesman told TPM the governor is standing by her version of events. But that spokesman, Matthew Benson, also acknowledged the governor has stumbled on certain facts in the past.

“She’s also been in political life for nearly three decades,” Benson said. “Has she ever said things that she wish she’d said more precisely? Of course.”

“I imagine President Obama would say the same thing,” he added.

In the past, when Brewer has been confronted about inaccurate statements, her first move has been to maintain she was right no matter how clear the matter was.

When a journalist for the Arizona Guardian first pointed out the discrepancy between how Brewer’s father actually died and what she had told another news organization, the governor got angry.

“There is no way I have ever misled anybody,” she said. “You’re trying to make a liar out of me.”

Later that same year, the governor went on Fox News to decry the effect illegal immigration was having on her state. Among the problems, she said, were that people were getting their heads cut off.

“We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings,” she told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren.

When quizzed about the fact that no beheadings had been reported in Arizona at that point, Brewer doubled down on the statement.

“Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert, either buried or just lying out there, that have been beheaded,” she said.

Neither she nor her office could point to an example of when anything like that had taken place. However, she continued to maintain for the next four months that she had not misspoken. Then in November of 2010, just days before her election, she relented.

“That was an error,” she said, then added: “if I said that.”