President Obama released his long-form birth certificate Wednesday, saying questions from “sideshows and carnival barkers” about his citizenship and legitimacy as president have become too distracting. “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” Obama said. “We’ve got better stuff to do.”
Right-wing fringe groups have been claiming since Obama’s 2008 campaign that he was covering up the fact that he’d been born abroad, possibly in Kenya, and so could not legally be president. In blogs and books, the so-called “birthers” demanded to see Obama’s long-form birth certificate from Hawaii.
Obama’s campaign in 2008 released a shorter version of his birth certificate — verified by independent fact checkers — though critics were not satisfied.
The long-form birth certificate released Wednesday says Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Hospital in Honolulu, which makes him eligible to be president.
The issue picked up steam in recent weeks, especially as real estate mogul Donald Trump — contemplating running for president as a Republican — suggested Obama may have pulled off “the greatest scam in history.”
“Donald Trump picked it up and decided to run with it,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It got lots and lots of ink, and I think it disturbed the president.”
Obama on April 22 requested that the Hawaii Department of Health make an exception to state privacy laws and release the long-form certificate, according to White House officials. The White House flew someone to Hawaii to pick it up earlier this week.
Obama said he has been “puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going” and complained that the recent budget battle with Republicans was overshadowed in the media by coverage of his birth certificate.
But an analysis by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism showed that 39 percent of news coverage during that period was about the economy and only 4 percent was about “birther” questions.
Political observers said Obama’s re-election effort is a more plausible reason for why he finally chose to release the certificate.
“I think doing it now, well in advance of 2012 and campaigning, he has an opportunity to let it sink in and deprive his most savage critics of ammunition,” said Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University.
Carol Swain, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt, said recent polling showing that only 38 percent of the public believed Obama was born in the United States was likely a “major impetus” for releasing the document.
“Another more cynical motivation would be they want to distract attention from other things that are taking place in the news,” said Swain, who previously called on Obama to release the certificate in the interest of historians doing research.
But Baker said he doesn’t think the release is “a slam-dunk” win for the president.
“I think one of the paradoxical outcomes of this,” he said, “is it actually helps the Republicans to rid them of a faction within their party that I think most Americans have derided as way out of the mainstream.”
Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, suggested Obama knew he was benefiting from all the talk about his birth certificate.
“It probably would have been in his … long-term political interests to allow this birther debate to dominate discussion in the Republican Party for months to come,” Pfeiffer said. “But he thought even though it might have been good politics, he thought it was bad for the country.”
