Nirthers

The so-called nirthers are people who believe that President Obama is not really a natural born American citizen and, therefore, under the Constitution not qualified to be president. They generally claim that he was not really born in Hawaii, that his real birth certificate has not been produced for examination, and that the documents than have been shown to the press and public are either insufficient documentation or out and out fakes.

All of this seems very puzzling on the surface. There is a lot of evidence from official records, newspaper announcements, and hospital records that the man was born when and where he says he was. Yet the thing goes on and on – which leads me to wonder why and who benefits from it. The simplest explanation is that it allows people who like conspiracies to have some fun with one, the same sort of fun similarly inclined folks get from claiming the government created Aids to kill undesirables or fretting over the supposed worldwide cover-ups of all those alien abductions . That, however, does not explain why this particularly conspiracy theory about this particular subject has caught on so widely.

One hypothesis is that the thing goes on because Obama’s operatives are surreptitiously stoking it. Certainly Obama and his boys are benefiting from it. First it gives them a fine straw man and a readymade group of nuts to tie to other critics of the administration in a general effort to smear their opponents. More important, it offers Obama cover, just as the lurid stories about complicity in murders and CIA dope smuggling out of Mena, Arkansas gave Bill Clinton cover. Assume that there are some skeletons in Obama’s personal closet (not unlikely given that he is a politician). This business with the birth certificate will give a compliant and complacent traditional media excuses for ignoring or laughing off the serious stuff if it ever surfaces. That sort of protection can be very valuable. Indeed, If I were Rahm Emanuel, and I had not started the rumor on the birth certificate, I would still be tempted to tell the boss I had.

Another hypothesis is that the rumor has legs because it dovetails both with some unusual things in Obama’s background and some old time prejudices. By the record, President Obama is the child of a flighty and irresponsible white mother and a black African father who was at least nominally a Muslim. He then spent part of his childhood in a predominately Islamic country. He was later raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii where it is said he went by the name of Barry. Later he reverted to Barack, moved to Illinois, and reinvented himself as a black American in the traditional and historical sense. While all this really says is that he had a colorful, rootless, and perhaps difficult childhood and that (like almost any other politician) he has been a shifty, chameleon-like opportunist, some people have seen it as suggesting something sinister. Even before the nirthers, there were public rumors that he was secretly a Muslim and private ones that he was some sort of Manchurian Candidate since so many of the people from his youth were so conveniently dead. Maybe some of that has fed into the craze over the birth certificate.

Whatever the actual explanations, it seems fairly clear that the nirthers are helping Obama politically and harming his critics at least to some degree. They ought to quit.