Seems Obama born yesterday
By Michael Graham | Thursday, April 28, 2011 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Op-Ed
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Photo by AP
Mr. President — you just got "pwned."'
That's Internet geek-speak for "owned" and yesterday you — the president of the United States — got your hat handed to you by a reality TV star. Without any political power, without the benefit of public office — in fact, he hasn't even voted in a primary in 20 years — Donald Trump forced you to finally fork over your birth certificate.
It's like being sent to jail by a judge, except in this case, it was Judge Judy.
Forget the certificate itself. The most astonishing thing I saw yesterday was a sitting president waiting for the host of "Celebrity Apprentice" to finish a New Hampshire press availability so he could start his own.
When your presidency is so lackluster you're getting upstaged by a guy whose job is to coax coherent sentences out of Gary Busey . . . well this was not a good moment for the republic.
It was out of concern for our republic that I had called on the president to release the long form birth certificate just the day before. I was horrified by a new USA Today/Gallup poll that found just 38 percent of Americans are confident Obama was born in the United States. In other words, two-thirds of Americans seriously wonder if our president is serving in violation of the Constitution.
Yes, this doubt was generated in part by anti-Obama kookery from the fringe right. But for the doubt to become a conspiracy, Team Obama had to play along. They had to leave the birth certificate hidden in the Hawaii Department of Health instead of just releasing it when the questions first arose.
Barack Obama and his media allies played the issue perfectly. The media continuously asked Republicans their position on the birther issue, sending a message that everyone who opposed Obamacare or criticized his fiscal failures was somehow linked to a lunatic conspiracy.
This may have been winning politics in the short term, but its long-term effect was to undermine the public's fundamental level of trust in the president. That's bad.
When the news broke yesterday morning that Obama was finally relenting, I hoped it was because our "uniter in chief" had seen the new poll and wanted to undo some of the damage. Alas, no.
Instead, we now know the White House contacted Hawaii officials on April 22 — five days earlier. Which raises the question again, "Why now?"
It wasn't because of Obama's bogus claim that the press was too birther obsessed to cover anything else. Hours after he played the "bad media" card, the independent Poynter Institute reported that the economy accounted for 39 percent of news coverage the week Obama gave his debt/deficit speech. The birther issue? Four percent.
So again — why? I believe it's because Obama could never answer the question, "Why not?"
As shamelessly self-interested and oddly-coiffed as Trump may be, he smartly focused on the question typical Americans could grasp — why doesn't the president just release the damn thing? Typical Americans get that. They also get the arrogance of a "public servant" who, without good reason, simply refuses to answer a simple question.
Even on the issue of his own birth certificate, Obama was once again "leading from the rear."
The guy out front? He's plugging the upcoming finale of his TV show.
