by Michael O'Brien
President Obama, in releasing his long form birth certificate, has put the the race-based, xenophobic birthers and fraud peddler Donald Trump in a corner. Throwing the last shovel of dirt on the birthers, President Obama has again shown his political skill. Trump and his racist birther followers have no where to go but deeper into Crazy Land where even the most ardent conservatives will be slow to tread.
In a master stroke of in-your-face politics the President will find it easier, not harder, to fend off what he himself referred to as the "silliness" of the birther movement. This did not stop Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus from attempting to blame the President for stoking the birther conspiracy, thus creating what the President called the "carnival sideshow" of Birther Land. Priebus conveniently forgot to mention in his remarks that close to half of Republicans polled wrongly believed that Obama was not a citizen, with another 15% not knowing.
Should the President have done this sooner? The answer lies in how much further the Right Wing will push this. The timing may well work in Obama's favor as the GOP will need to push the Tea Party aside for fear of being connected with increasingly unbalanced and delusional conspiracy theories about the President's educational pedigree. Trump insists that the President could not have gotten into Harvard, a school that more than likely rejected Trump. Trump flaunts this nonsense in the face of Obama graduating cum laude and having been the first African American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.
The advantage also falls to the President given that the sensible middle of likely voters have not embraced that Right's racist paranoia and the few that have will likely be persuaded that, as has always been, President Obama is a citizen.
