President Obama has been pestered by the birther issue since the
2008 Democratic primary. Why would he wait until yesterday to
release his long-form birth certificate and put the issue to rest?
Because until now it didn’t make political sense to do so.
Until this spring, birtherism was a political plus for
Obama. Let’s face it, screaming for the president’s birth
certificate — when there is no evidence he was born outside the
country — doesn’t make someone look like the type of person you’d
want to hire to walk your dog, much less run the country. By
ignoring the question and sometimes laughing it away, Obama came
off as cool and reasonable by contrast. His passivity itself was
enough to portray birthers as fringe kooks who should not be taken
seriously.
In July of 2009, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs
called the conspiracy theory “made-up, fictional nonsense.” Then
the big dismissal: “I almost hate to indulge in such an august
setting as the White House.”
Less than two years later, the president thought the issue
was important enough to indulge not only in the White House, but
personally. It wasn’t the press secretary speaking from the podium
yesterday, it was the president himself.
The change can’t be explained by the poll numbers. In the
summer of 2009, polls were showing that 25 percent of Americans
questioned Obama’s citizenship. Last week, a CBS News poll put the
number at 25 percent. What changed the president’s mind, he said,
was the media attention.
“But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a
budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country,
and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we
needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure
that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were
closing the deficit, during that entire week, the dominant news
story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re gonna
have to make as a nation, it was about my birth certificate.”
Funny thing about that anecdote. It isn’t true. The birth
certificate was not the dominant story. When Washington reporters
tweeted that point yesterday, it was suggested that maybe the issue
was bigger on cable, and the White House pays too much attention to
cable. Maybe. Or maybe the president didn’t want to admit that
Donald Trump had gotten under his skin.
If releasing his birth certificate was made necessary
because the media were distracted by the issue, and were thereby
neglecting the important stories, then why in the world would he
release it on the same day news broke of his decision to appoint
Gen. David Petraeus as CIA director and Leon Panetta secretary of
defense? Surely these are the kinds of substantive stories the
media should spend their time covering instead of being distracted
by the birth certificate. But with his press conference, the
president guaranteed that no one would cover anything that day
except the birther issue.
And of course it was a total coincidence that the
president happened to hold the press conference at the exact same
time Donald Trump was holding a nationally televised press
conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the occasion of his
first visit to the first-in-the-nation primary state since
1988.
I don’t buy it. This is a president who doesn’t so much
decide to go to war as feel his way to it. He makes emotional
decisions. Trump got to him, and the president was going to take
him down a notch. If this spring’s birtherism were a sequel to the
first time it arose, it would be titled “Birthers II: This time,
it’s personal.”
But there’s more to it than Trump getting the hairs on the
back of Obama’s neck to stand up. Jerome Corsi’s birther book was
soon to be released. To the left, it is an article of faith that
John Kerry lost the 2004 election because he didn’t immediately
counter the Swift Boaters. He let their story spread until just
enough people believed it, and Bush won. Obama decided he
wasn’t going to get Swift Boated by the birthers.
So he held his press conference, and the national networks
cut to it — and away from Trump — just about the time Trump
finished asking why Obama has never released his academic records.
Advantage Obama, for now. But something tells me Trump isn’t going
to stop asking for those school transcripts anytime
soon.
