Birthers: The Kenya question returns

last updated 8 January 2015

The birthers are back, said Karen Tumulty in WashingtonPost.com. The seemingly never-ending quest by conspiracy-minded conservatives to uncover President Obama’s true birthplace now has a “new twist”—not that the president was born in Kenya, but that he “tried to pretend he was.” The conservative website Breitbart.com unearthed a biography of Obama last week that was distributed in the publishing industry by his then literary agency in 1991, which described him as “born in Kenya, and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.” The conservative blogosphere was gleeful: Was Obama really foreign born? Or did he lie about his birthplace to make his rise seem more romantic and impressive? The truth, alas, is more prosaic—it was a simple fact-checking error, made by a junior staffer without Obama’s knowledge. “Still, a new myth is born.” That’s no bad thing, said Brent Budowsky in TheHill.com. Every time this “discredited nonsense” comes up, Americans are reminded that the Republican Party is riddled with extremist wingnuts. “As a Democrat I say: Thank you, birthers.”

This revelation has nothing to do with birtherism, said James Taranto in WSJ.com. This is more about who the president is—or who he claims to be. It’s hard not to suspect that Obama either introduced the error or let it stand in the hope that “tales of exotic origins” might boost his academic career—just as his liberal friend Elizabeth Warren did by dubiously claiming Native American ancestry. We suspect Obama claimed to be Kenyan to “juice his application” to Harvard Law School, said Investors.com in an editorial. But we’ll never know, because his academic records are sealed—and the media won’t demand access. So bewitched are they by the “mythical savior figure they created in 2008,” they haven’t told us a thing about the real Obama. “Just who is the man sitting in the people’s house?”

I doubt we’ll ever know, said Mark Steyn in the Orange County, Calif., Register. Obama is such a skilled shape-shifter that even he isn’t sure who he is. Aloof, remote, calculating, he has been able to shift between Barry and Barack, American and African, liberal and moderate, depending on which was more beneficial at the time. When it came to running for president, he ran on a vague biography, and allowed others to project their wishes on him. So why shouldn’t Obama be unconcerned with reality? To impress some Americans, “he just has to be.”