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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Clarence Page
Donald Trump: The Media Master (© Chan Lowe)
Donald Trump has joined the "birthers," the odd movement that questions President Barack Obama's Hawaii birth certificate. That's a good way for the celebrity billionaire to sound like he's making a serious run for the Republican presidential nomination, which he says he is considering. It also makes him sound like a secret agent for the Democrats.
That oddly credible possibility has been raised by frustrated conservatives like syndicated radio talk show host John Gibson. He sounded furious earlier this week at the way birthers make Republicans look like the crazy party, an image that only hurts the party's chances with independent swing voters in general elections. Now Trump is giving the certificate skeptics even more attention. Surely, Gibson speculated with tongue apparently in cheek, Trump sounds like some sort of RINO, a Republican-in-name-only who's secretly trying to help Obama.
Robert Schlesinger, opinion editor at
Indeed, if Obama is not directly supporting Trump, he has good reason to root secretly for the birther movement whose backing Trump seeks.
Trump even added to the amusement of Democrats when he when he flamboyantly released his own birth certificate to the world and chided Obama to show his. Trouble is, as Politico reported, the document Trump released was a certificate issued by the hospital where he was born, not the legal birth certificate issued by the
Before Trump came up with the real deal Tuesday, Politico's Ben Smith already was questioning Trump's citizenship. After all, he noted, Trump's mom was born in Scotland and he has a plane registered in the Bahamas. Far-fetched, but no more so than the strange speculations of the birthers about Obama.
Whether Trump, who dropped similar hints in 1988 and 2000, is serious or putting us on, his birther ploy exposes how much the
Sure, Democrats have their nutty wing, too. But polls indicate that the far left can only dream of gaining the sway among Dems that the birthers appear to be exerting in the
Doubters of Obama's citizen birth now make up a majority of voters who say they're likely to participate in a Republican primary next year, according to a Public Policy Polling survey in February.
Some 51 percent say they don't think the president was born in the United States, while only 28 percent believe that he was.
That's an increase in
Against those numbers, another potential candidate, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, sounded like a voice in the wilderness as he responded to Trump's stance. "I, for one, do not believe we (Republican candidates) should be raising that issue," he said. He's right. Proponents of the widely debunked birther conspiracy theory already have enough enablers.
Even House Speaker John Boehner recently declined to warn his fellow Republicans to steer clear of birtherism. Even though he said in a television interview that he believes Obama, he also said, "It's not my job to tell the American people what to think." No, I guess the speaker doesn't care what we think, as long as we vote his way.
Questions about Obama's birth certificate were raised during the 2008 Democratic primaries. But as doubts faded over time among Democrats, they appear to have increased among Republicans.
Some people blame racial prejudice for it, but I think a larger political and cultural xenophobia is at work here. How you answer the birth-certificate question has become a political and social identifier, shorthand for whether you're part of Obama's America or the one that lauds, say, Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck.
Sure, the birthers say, all Obama has to do is release access to his "real" birth certificate in Hawaii. But if I were Obama, that's the last thing I would do. It certainly wouldn't settle anything. Practitioners of paranoid politics always come up with new excuses to reach their preconceived conclusions.
Besides, why get in the way of your opposition party when they're coddling their own kooks?
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