Barack Obama Citizenship Conspiracy Theories - Commentary and Criticism

Commentary and Criticism

Democrat Philip Berg's lawsuit allegations that Obama had lost his U.S. citizenship while living in Indonesia, were criticized by WND in August 2008 as not supported by U.S. citizenship law. At that time, WND also reported being told by forgery experts that "many of the forgery claims made against the image were inconclusive or falsified, leaving them no evidence that would cast doubt on the image's authenticity." However, by December 20, WND publisher Joseph Farah said the authenticity of the birth certificate image was under serious question. Following criticism from the media, Farah defended his apparent reversal saying WND's August 2008 report had been based on the best information available at the time, and the real issue was not the "veracity of the image", rather it was that information was missing such as the location of the birth and the name of the delivery physician.

Proponents of claims doubting Obama's eligibility have been dubbed "birthers" by their critics, who have drawn a parallel with 9/11 conspiracy theorists or "truthers". Leslie Savan of The Nation has compared the so-called "birthers" to other groups as well, including those who deny the moon landing, the Holocaust or global warming; "Teabaggers who refuse to believe they must pay taxes" and creationists who believe the earth is 6,000 years old. MSNBC political commentator Rachel Maddow has defined a "birther" as:

A specific new breed of American conspiracy theorists who believe that the real problem with Barack Obama being president is that he can't possibly have been born in the United States. He's not eligible to be president. The birth certificate is a fake. He's a foreigner. Once this has been exposed, I guess, he will be run out of the White House ...

Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin has said trutherism exists on both the left and the right, and has described its persistence: "The plain truth will never mollify a Truther. There’s always a convoluted excuse – some inconsequential discrepancy to seize on, some photographic "evidence" to magnify into a blur of meaningless pixels – that will rationalize irrationality". A number of conservative commentators including Malkin have criticized its proponents and their effect on the wider conservative movement. In late 2008, Malkin said a "dangerously large segment" of "birth certificate hunters" had "lurched into rabid Truther territory". She also opined there may be a "seed of a legitimate constitutional issue" related to enforcing the citizenship requirement for presidential candidates. Talk show host Michael Medved, has also been critical, calling them "the worst enemy of the conservative movement" for making other conservatives "look sick, troubled and not suitable for civilized company." Conservative columnist Ann Coulter has referred to them as "just a few cranks." Paleoconservative pundit Steve Sailer has dismissed the conspiracy theories, saying,

Of course he was born in Hawaii ... The idea that his heavily pregnant mother ... would get on an early 707 and fly at great expense to some foreign country is ridiculous – especially the popular theory that he was born in Kenya. Do you know how many different flights she would have had to take to get to Kenya in 1961?

An editorial in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin dismissed the claims about Obama's eligibility as proposing "a vast conspiracy involving Obama's parents, state officials, the news media, the Secret Service, think-tanks and a host of yet-to-be-uncovered others who have connived since Obama's birth to build a false record so that he could eventually seek the presidency 47 years later." The St. Petersburg Times' fact-checking website, PolitiFact.com, concluded its series of article on the birth certificate issue by saying:

There is not one shred of evidence to disprove PolitiFact's conclusion that the candidate's name is Barack Hussein Obama, or to support allegations that the birth certificate he released isn't authentic. And that's true no matter how many people cling to some hint of doubt and use the Internet to fuel their innate sense of distrust.

In November 2008, commentator and social critic Camille Paglia criticized the "blathering, fanatical overkill" of the topic, but also questioned Obama's response: "Obama could have ended the entire matter months ago by publicly requesting Hawaii to issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it", she said. A parenthetical in the same article noted that "(The campaign did make the "short-form" certificate available to Factcheck.org)".

Factcheck.org noted, "The Hawaii Department of Health's birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department."

Writing in December 2008, Alex Koppelman discussed the validity of the common argument – that Obama should release a copy of his full, original certificate and the rumors and doubts would disappear. Conspiracy theory experts told Koppelman that when committed conspiracists are presented with more data debunking their theory, they refuse to accept the new evidence. "Whatever can't be ignored can be twisted to fit into the narrative; every new disclosure of something that should, by rights, end the controversy only opens up new questions, identifies new plotters", he wrote. Because Obama's release of the short-form had only "stoked the fever of conspiracy mongers", Koppleman predicted that releasing the long-form certificate "would almost certainly" continue the rumor cycle.

In response to the notion that Obama's grandparents might have planted a birth announcement in newspapers just so their grandson could some day be president, FactCheck suggested that "those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat." Brooks Jackson, the director of FactCheck, comments that "it all reflects a surge of paranoid distress among people who don't like Barack Obama" and who want the election results to go away. Chip Berlet, a journalist who has studied the spread of conspiracy theories, notes "For some people, when their side loses an election, the only explanation that makes sense to them – that they can cope with – is that sinister, bad, evil people arranged some kind of fraud." American political writer Dana Milbank, writing for the Washington Post, describes the Obama citizenship theories of Bob Schulz (chairman of the We the People Foundation, which in 2008 publicly challenged Obama's citizenship) as "hysteria". Colorado presidential elector Camilla Auger, responding to lobbying of members of the Electoral College, commented: "I was concerned that there are that many nutty people in the country making depressing, absurd allegations."

Some commentators have asserted that racism is a factor motivating the promotion of Obama citizenship conspiracy theories. J. Richard Cohen, the President of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that monitors hate groups and extremism, wrote an e-mail to supporters in July 2009 declaring: "This conspiracy theory was concocted by an anti-Semite and circulated by racist extremists who cannot accept the fact that a black man has been elected president." An academic psychologist commented that a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology supported a conclusion that racism has played a role. Donald Trump's questioning how Obama gained admission to two Ivy-League institutions, as well as his comment, "I have a great relationship with the blacks," led David Remnick, David Letterman, and Bill Maher, among others, to accuse Trump of racism, and an increased attention on race with respect to Obama. In April 2011, Marilyn Davenport, a Tea Party activist and member of the executive committee of the Republican Party's local Orange County, California, organization, created a nationwide controversy when she circulated a photograph by email, widely seen as racist, that had been edited to depict Barack Obama as the child of two chimpanzees, and to which she had added the caption, "Now you know why no birth certificate". The party chapter censured her and asked her to resign, but she refused. Following the release of Obama's long form certificate later that month, The New York Times remarked in an editorial that, "It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious 'other' would have been conducted against a white president."