And so a political grassy knoll — for a large chunk of voters not in the political Twilight Zone or seeking to fabricate a political battering ram, at least — has now bit the dust: the White House has released President Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate after the issue was shoved from the fringe of American politics to the forefront by Donald Trump, a drumbeat by conservative pundits and talk show hosts such as Sean Hannity and by massive coverage of the “issue” by Fox News.
Obama also had some comments on this “issue.” His comments could be a political plus: he criticized things that are made up for political gain at a time when the country faces huge issue. Prediction: many independent voters will be turned off by what happened on this and will not trust those who were peddling the narrative.
So will this narrative stop? Take your bets now. I say: 1. Probably not. Someone may even claim it was forged. 2. Trump apparently saw what was coming because he has now shifted to essentially saying Obama got into Ivy league schools by affirmative action and is demanding his college records — an new attack line echoed by Pat Buchanan and others.
UPDATE: In fact, the birthers have already indicated they are not satisfied and have a new line of attack, The Politico reports:
The theories about President Barack Obama’s birth — as we reported last week — have evolved over time from the idea that he was a Muslim to the modern incarnation that he was smuggled into the U.S. from Kenya. With the release of his long-form birth certificate today, they’ve evolved again.
Phil Berg, who filed one of the original birther lawsuits, now believes that Obama was adopted by his Indonesian father and lost his U.S. citizenship:“I think the issue is that he’s not any more natural born. I don’t care if he releases his birth certificate or whatever,” said Berg. “Let’s see his records coming back through immigration.”
Orly Taitz, once called ‘Queen of the birthers’ and who was responsible for a number of lawsuits, is verifying the document’s authenticity and now believes that the president is using a false social security number.
Questions: Will those in the political world and media who raised this issue with political intentions? Or has the country’s political values and the value placed on truth in assertions so shifted that nothing matters anymore than scoring political points and negatively defining someone? It’s not a small issue.
HERE is the long form birth certificate.
Here are Obama’s comments on the release:
Here’s the statement on the White House website from Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director:
In 2008, in response to media inquiries, the President’s campaign requested his birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. The state sent the campaign the President’s birth certificate, the same legal documentation provided to all Hawaiians as proof of birth in state, and the campaign immediately posted it on the internet.
When any citizen born in Hawaii requests their birth certificate, they receive exactly what the President received. In fact, the document posted on the campaign website is what Hawaiians use to get a driver’s license from the state and the document recognized by the Federal Government and the courts for all legal purposes. That’s because it is the birth certificate. This is not and should not be an open question.
The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting.
At a time of great consequence for this country – when we should be debating how we win the future, reduce our deficit, deal with high gas prices, and bring stability to the Middle East, Washington, DC, was once again distracted by a fake issue. The President’s hope is that with this step, we can move on to debating the bigger issues that matter to the American people and the future of the country.
Donald Trump won’t be the only one asking why Obama waited so long. Andrew Sullivan writes:
So he had the power to get this into the public eye and yet resisted until the country’s polity was almost paralyzed with distraction. I know this was an ethically legitimate position after releasing the short-form document proving that he was indeed born in the US. I know it was politically savvy because, by the rules of jujitsu, Obama allowed the nutty right (is there any other variety with influence now?) to make fools of themselves.
Nonetheless, I think this should have been done long ago.
Because a president has to put his public responsibilities before his pride and his privacy. That’s the price of the job – to defuse or debunk conspiracy theorists or just skeptics with all the relevant information you have.
It’s also the job of the media always to press for more information, not less. But so many spent their energy arguing that Obama need do no more and piling on the Birthers. They still seem to think they are gatekeepers, possessors of the power to decide what is or is not legitimate for citizens to ask of their public officials.
What could come next? Birthers, Trump and those who pressed this theme will could demand more than ever that Obama produce his college records and prove that he wasn’t an affirmative action produced student. Such is the nature of 21st century the talk radio and reality show political cultures.
HERE’S A CROSS SECTION OF MEDIA AND BLOG REACTION:
–-Glenn Reynolds:
TRUMP 1, OBAMA 0: So I was at the gym when they finally caved and released the birth certificate – and on both the Fox and the CNN monitors I saw Donald Trump, who quickly started talking about . . . gasoline prices. See, he knows how to keep the pressure on. Other GOP candidates might want to take a lesson. Maybe they could talk about milk.
UPDATE: Trump: Now Release Your College Records!
ANOTHER UPDATE: The White House may think it’s sprung a trap, but I think they waited too long. By now — as the polls from earlier this week showing how many independents thought Obama wasn’t born here, and which probably prompted the release decision, indicate — the damage is done. Even if people change their minds on the issue, for many the residual suspicion will remain: The thought that regardless of where he was born, there’s something shady about him.
—Crooks and Liars’ David Neiwart:
Of course, Obama actually released a birth certificate back in 2008 — but it wasn’t enough to satisfy nutcases like Trump and his political adviser, WorldNutDaily’s Joseph Farah.
Trump has nothing to be proud of: Indeed, he owes the president an apology — for smearing his name and casting doubt on his birth and citizenship.
Not that we’ll ever get it. After all, Being Republican Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry.
—From the Twitter page of Larry Sabato, one of the country’s top and most accurate political analysts:
LarrySabato Larry Sabato
Trump is making a chump of the news media.
1 hour agoLarrySabato Larry Sabato
Donald Trump, royal wedding, Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen–We’re entertaining ourselves to death while the debt bomb ticks away.
1 hour agoLarrySabato Larry Sabato
Attn TV nets: ENOUGH DONALD TRUMP. You’ve had your fun. Get serious. Even this ridiculously over-covered royal wedding will be a relief.
2 hours agoLarrySabato Larry Sabato
Look at U.S. history: Long line of Donald Trumps. There will always be a big market for snake oil in American politics.
2 hours agoLarrySabato Larry Sabato
The absurdity of watching networks reluctantly switch from The Donald to Obama about a non-issue Trump promoted.
2 hours agoLarrySabato Larry Sabato
Tsk,tsk. Trump fooled by obvious CIA-produced Obama birth doc. Who’s promoted today? CIA’s Panetta. Wake up, Donald! It’s so easy.
2 hours ago
How evident was it that this was ALL he needed to do to prove he is a citizen? Try this on for size- not one god damned state contested his citizenship in the election. Jan Brewer just vetoed the birther bill in Arizona because it was an exercise in redundancy exercise and ran headlong into the full faith and credit clause. This new release will solve nothing, and the birthers will still continue to spew their nonsense.
President Obama has done nothing wrong, other than being black, which is apparently a sin for much of the country. Stating that he had an obligation to release this form or that he waited too long to do it turns everything upside down. Obama is the wronged party here.
–In Great Britain, the Guardian has an excellent roundup. Here are a few tidbits from it (read it in full):
.11.40am ET: The real winner from today’s events? Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve.
Bernanke is holding his first live press conference following a Federal Open Markets Committee interest rate-setting decision – the US equivalent of the Bank of England’s MPC – later this afternoon. On any normal day this would have been the big news story. But right now Ben could break down sobbing “We’re all doomed!” while start setting fire to $100 bills, and it might make a brief item on the 10 o’clock news…
10.35am ET: How has the epicentre of birtherism – the swivel-eyed website WorldNetDaily – coping with today’s events? Here’s its lead headline:
White House releases Obama ‘birth certificate’
The “quote marks” say it all.
9.54am ET: Fox News is all over the story, as are all the US cable networks. “I think we just heard the president call Donald Trump a carnival barker,” says the Fox News White House correspondent.
“There will be sections of the population that will still not believe this,” the correspondent notes, rather pessimistically.
Obama Reveals Unsuccessful Run for President of Kenya
Disqualified by U.S. Birth CertificateWASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In a stunning announcement that took even political insiders by surprise, President Barack Obama revealed today that he ran for President of Kenya in 2005 but was disqualified when a birth certificate surfaced showing he was born in the United States.
At a press conference at the White House, Mr. Obama spoke for the first time about his little-known unsuccessful foray into Kenyan politics: “Like every American boy or girl, I grew up with the dream of someday becoming President of Kenya.”
But soon after he entered the race, political opponents began spreading rumors that he was not “a real Kenyan,” the President said, and foiled his bid by disseminating copies of his authentic American birth certificate.
“I guess I didn’t look into the rules closely enough before I ran,” the President admitted. “I got caught up in the excitement of being President of Kenya and I guess I just got carried away.”
Read the whole thing.
—The Christian Science Monitor suggests the Obama team may have reason to smile:
That’s adroit – Trump pats himself on the back for raising vague questions about Obama’s citizenship, and then runs around to the other side and aligns himself with Obama in terms of let’s-move-on-to-more-important-things. No wonder he’s doing so well in polls versus other potential Republican candidates.
But here’s the thing – we’re pretty sure Obama’s political team is not that sorry that Trump is doing well.
Consider if from their point of view. A substantial portion of Republican voters remain suspicious of Obama’s origins. It’s an issue that one way or another was going to surface in the 2012 campaign. If Obama releases his birth certificate now, yes, that may help Trump. But Trump is currently the nor’easter of GOP politics – a big wind that’s rattling all the other contenders.
Obama’s advisors believe the developer/reality show star is unelectable because his unfavorable rating among independents and the electorate at large is so high. A recent Gallup survey found that 64 percent of registered voters said they would definitely not vote for Trump for president.
Yet he has enough strength among GOP voters to keep more serious candidates (we’re looking at you, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty) from gaining momentum.
The right wing whining will now reach a fever pitch, and World Net Daily will soon come out with “proof” that it’s a forgery.
Without even a trace of irony, Donald Trump is very proud of himself.,,
Johnson quotes a leading conservative birther blogger who now simply asks why Obama took so long and writes:
Not a single word about the fact that she was totally, 100% WRONG, with her endless “proofs” that the “short form” was a fake. She just moves right along to the next stupid talking point.
Can you tell how completely disgusted I am that it came to this? The right wing has discredited itself utterly. Good work, idiots.
—James Fallows has a must read detailed analysis. A few of his points:
3) Tribal knowledge vs actual knowledge front: Yesterday, about half of all Republicans thought Obama was foreign born, and therefore an illegal occupant of the White House. How many Republicans will think the same thing one week from now? My guess is: about half. We’ve reached that stage on just about everything. It’s probably been true of human beings throughout time, but is more obviously significant in politics now, that generally people don’t act like scientific investigators, or judges in moot-court competitions, when parsing the logic and evidence behind competing arguments to come up with political views. They go on loyalty, and tradition, and hope, and fear, and self-interest, and generosity, and all the rest — as the second half of my recent article on the new media discussed.
Here we have a wonderful real-world test: if “actual knowledge” mattered, the number of people who thought Obama was foreign-born would approach zero by next week — with exceptions for illiterates, the mentally disabled, paranoid schizophrenics, etc. My guess is that the figures will barely change….
…My real point is: knowing for sure that Trump’s “lead” in the GOP polls now is a quaint artifact of name recognition, and knowing that there is no chance that his “colorful” background and prima donna manner could stand the long grueling, humiliating ordeal of the primaries and the caucuses and the endless interviews, how long will the press keep acting as the megaphone for this carnival barker? Why aren’t they jumping all over him now, for the patent idiocy of his “birther” claim, rather than acting as if somehow he has scored a point by making Obama react? In reality, he’ll be on the stage with the press’ megaphone until people get bored with him — which gradually but undeniably has happened to Palin.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.