Obama and Birtherism

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Sept 2016

It’s been a while, and people forgot how the question of Obama’s birth came into the political conversation in the first place - and how it ended the first time.  Its recrudescence in the current election campaign is a lesson in political tactics.

Let’s begin with a series of Tweets from the serious and widely-respected columnist Byron York that I shamelessly copy-typed from Ann Coulter’s website.  They run as follows:

When controversy reached non-useful levels, Obama quickly released certificate sucking air out of birtherism.

So Obama declined to authorize release of original birth certificate.  Then Trump upped the ante, raised public, press brouhaha.

Obama could use fringe birthers to embarrass more mainstream Republicans.  Plus, useful to keep Dem base agitated.

My memory is in ’10, ’11 Obama tolerated, saw some political benefit in birtherism.

Don’t really object to claim that Trump ended birtherism.  Certainly played big part.

This sequence neatly captures the fact that Obama himself once exploited the issue to his own benefit.  During the 2008 Democrat primaries, the Hillary Clinton campaign found someone who alleged that Obama was in fact born in Africa, not Hawaii, as he claimed.  Hillary campaign operative Sidney Blumenthal tried to plant the rumour in the media that Obama was born in Africa, not America.  (This was confirmed by former McClatchy D.C. Bureau Chief James Asher) The issue did not prove harmful to Obama’s nomination campaign in 2008, and by the time Obama was running against John McCain for the presidency in the fall, “birtherism” - believing that Obama may be ineligible for the presidency because he was not a “natural-born” American - was a sign of racism, if not of lunacy.

Even after Obama captured the presidency, the issue was never really put to rest.  Obama himself found it useful to keep the issue alive as a means of embarrassing Republicans though suggestions of racism if not of downright craziness, as Byron York tweeted at the time.  Obama did the same thing with the “Muslim” issue.  And as York records, it finally took someone as big as Donald Trump to force Obama to fish or cut bait on the birth issue.  To quiet an unprofitable political storm, Obama released the long-form birth certificate of Hawaii, and that ended serious discussion of the birth matter.

What seems to have be forgotten was the evidence that had been accumulated that Obama himself may have taken advantage of his alleged African birth earlier in his life when such exotic ancestry was beneficial to him.

For example, remember Dreams from my Father ?  A promotional booklet put out by Obama’s literary agency, Acton and Dystel (printed in 1991 and posted on their website until 2007) said that Obama was “born in Kenya, and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”  Obama omitted to correct his literary agency for sixteen years.  These facts were part of the evidence amassed to buttress the case that Obama was not a natural-born American.  These were things Obama himself, by omission, (if not provable commission) let stand.

Finally, (and this is pure speculation on my part) as Barry Soetoro, Obama may have been admitted to Ivy League universities with less than stellar marks using the special programs these colleges have to recruit students from third world countries, like Kenya.  And with free tuition to boot.

It was under one of these special admission programs for students of the third world that his father Barack Obama, Sr, was able to come to America as a Ph.D. student and in 1960 meet his seventeen-year-old mother-to-be, Ann Dunham.

The suspicion that Obama willingly deceived his way into Ivy League universities by alleging that he was born in Kenya can be neither confirmed nor denied because Obama will not consent to the release of his college records, (records that would include his transcripts of marks among other things.)

So, why is the birther issue even coming up now?  Obama isn’t running for a third term.  He’s not in the race.  And his final term is nearly over.

Well, Trump is in the race, and Trump the man who pushed Obama into releasing his long-form Hawaiian birth certificate.  The media are bringing up birtherism now at the instigation of the Hillary Clinton campaign, conveniently ignoring the fact that her own 2008 campaign was the first to raise it.  Birtherism once again is being employed to embarrass mainstream Republicans and to agitate the Democrat base.  In this case, the Democrat base in question is the media.

On Friday, Trump humiliated the media and put the birther issue to rest, for this campaign at least, at his press conference in Washington, D.C.  At an event highlighting the opening of his new Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, Trump tricked the media into broadcasting a half hour of endorsements of him from retired military Generals and decorated military heroes, forty-four in total.  Finally, after about thirty minutes of endorsements on live, free broadcast time, Trump took to the microphone and said what the media thought they came for, “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it.  President Barack Obama was born in the United States, Period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong again.”  Trump turned his back on the media and took no questions.

By forcing Obama to end the birther controversy, Trump earned Obama’s eternal enmity.  The media themselves have such disregard, if not hatred, for Trump that they were drawn into raising the issue again at the helpful and increasingly desperate instigation of the Hillary campaign.

The media ended up with egg on their faces, and the country witnessed a demonstration of how good a political tactician Donald Trump really is.

The media is furious with Trump and are having fits trying to keep Trump’s “birther” credentials alive.

-30-