US Elections

Born in the U.S.A.

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

27 April 2011

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There it is. The "long form" birth certificate of the President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama. It was this lack of a "long form" that the "birther" conspiracy theorists pinned their claim that Obama was not entitled to hold the office of President. Obama had released his birth certificate previously, but the White House today made public this longer document. You can see it in PDF form here.

Lately, one of the more outspoken proponents of this now-debunked-more-than-ever conspiracy theory has been the semi-serious Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Ironically, a recent Gallup poll discovered that only 43 per cent of Americans believe for certain that Trump was born in the United States. (Trump was born in Queens, New York, NY.) On this, Nate Silver observed:

At least some fraction of the people who tell pollsters that Mr. Obama was foreign-born are probably kidding around, just as they are when the same question is asked of Mr. Trump. I’d imagine that you could substitute virtually any name in the place of Mr. Trump or Mr. Obama — Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan, or Oprah Winfrey, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Sarah Palin — and find that at least a few Americans reported themselves to be “birthers.”

[...]

Clearly, some people do believe the lies and distortions about Mr. Obama’s birthplace; I’m just not sure that the fraction is as great as overly-literal readings of these surveys might suggest. I’m also not sure that news organizations are necessarily doing all that much good by constantly debunking the rumors, which both legitimizes the topic as a point of discussion, and which may encourage some conservatives to say they have doubts about Mr. Obama’s birthplace in order to poke fun at the press. If you’re a mainstream conservative who is firmly convinced that Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, you might nevertheless find it amusing when CNN credulously sends some of its top reporters to Honolulu to investigate the story ... Some voters who don’t have any particular doubts about Mr. Obama’s birthplace might nevertheless appreciate that Mr. Trump is “in on the joke” by raising questions about it.

As I've said before, birtherism is more about identifying oneself as an opponent of the President, and not about literally having doubts that he was born inside the United States. It follows on from a belief that Obama does not fit in with a certain conception of Americanness, and that therefore he must also be literally foreign.

Birthers will not change their mind about the President because of this document. Some of them already believed he was an American-born citizen, and claimed to suspect he was not as an expression of their dislike for him and his policies. The rest have shown themselves impervious to any rational argument, and there is no reason to think this will change their minds. It's disappointing that the White House is bothering to argue with people who will not be reasoned with, and it's disappointing that it feels it has to.

You tell 'em, Bruce.

Tags: Barack Obama, Birth Certificate, Birthers, Born In The Usa, Bruce Springsteen, Donald Trump, Long Form Birth Certificate, The White House

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