CBC
Loop-dee-loo and the blues of the birthers
The American right's fascination with where Barack Obama might have been born
By Neil Macdonald, CBC News
President Obama puts down the morning paper and beams around at his 2012 election team. Some of those in the room have been having trouble controlling their giggling fits.
"Come on, guys," says the president. "This is fun, but we have to concentrate. How do we replicate what we did the last time?"
"How about we just replicate Huckabee?" suggestss his campaign manager. "We could even get some theme music written up. A poppa-oom-MAU-MAU!"
At this, the others collapse again.
Obama grins: "I know. It's unbelievable, isn't it?. I have a hard time keeping a straight face about it in public, too. But Michelle and I are officially deeply hurt, and that's what I'm sticking to."
"Oh FOR SURE," says his press adviser. "Number one rule, boss. Never interrupt an opponent when he's making a fool of himself."
…
OK, I made up that discussion. But you have to believe something like it is going on nowadays in the Oval Office.
The point, of course, is that it's not just Mike Huckabee but the Republican leadership in general who are making fools of themselves.
Huckabee is just the latest to jump on this whole "birther" thing — the claim that Barack Obama is a Muslim who was not born in the U.S. and is therefore illegally occupying the White House.
It's as though even old-guard Republicans are now on board an out-of-control train being pulled by a Tea Party locomotive. They know it could end badly, but seem unable to work up enough nerve to scream "Stop!"
Former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee delivers the sermon at First Wesleyan Church in High Point, N.C. on March 6, 2011. His sermon focused on humility and withholding judgment followed by a book signing of his latest book, 'A Simple Government.' (Lynn Hey/Associated Press)Former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister, Mike Huckabee delivers the sermon at First Wesleyan Church in High Point, N.C. on March 6, 2011. His sermon focused on humility and withholding judgment followed by a book signing of his latest book, 'A Simple Government.' (Lynn Hey/Associated Press)
Take Huckabee, a former presidential contender himself. In fact, judging by final delegate totals, he came second to John McCain for the party nomination in 2008.
Asked about the birther issue by a radio host recently, Huckabee replied eagerly that he'd "love to know more." "One thing that I do know," he said of Obama, "is his perspective growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."
Well, hard to argue that the British Empire wasn't imperial (or that it didn't persecute a few people) but Obama didn't grow up in Kenya. He never set foot there, in fact, until his mid-30s. So Huckabee had to retrench.
He issued a statement saying he'd "misspoken," and that he actually meant Indonesia.
Of course, that statement didn't bother explaining the business about the Mau Maus, who as far as anyone knows had no Indonesian chapter.
But Huckabee didn't stop there.
"Most of us," he told another conservative radio host, "grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary clubs, not madrassas."
Well, three things about that statement: Obama grew up in Hawaii, a U.S. state.
He did spend nearly four years of his childhood in Indonesia, but the smear/rumor that he attended an Islamic madrassa was disproven years ago. He attended a Christian academy.
There were also Rotary clubs in Jakarta and Obama, it appears, was a Cub scout.
Loop-dee-loo
None of that would appear to matter, it seems. In the loop-dee-loo universe of the birthers, facts are inconveniences.
Unlike most conspiracy theorists, though, they've managed to seed and grow their suspicions. Polls now suggest one in five Americans — and one in four Republicans — believe Obama is a Muslim, an increase over similar surveys in 2008. And most likely one who was born somewhere else.
YouTube has a piece of video from a Republican primary meeting in Delaware last year. A woman is on her feet, declaring, to the discomfort of the candidate on the dais, that Obama "is a citizen of Kenya!"
"I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK," she screams, before leading the crowd into a recital of the pledge of allegiance.
It's all nuts, of course. Hawaii has produced Obama's birth certificate. He has no Kenyan citizenship.
And if he is a Muslim, he's an apostate. Muslims aren't supposed to worship Jesus, as Obama and his family have been doing for years.
Weasel words
GOP leaders, like House Speaker John Boehner, know Obama's background full well. They've studied him to death.
But the people who attend rallies dressed up in tricorne hats and waving posters of Obama in a turban tend to vote Republican, so a set of weasel-word talking points has developed.
When asked, prominent Republicans such as Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, say that if Obama says he's a Christian, well, "I'll take him at his word."
In any event, said Boehner recently, "the American people have the right to think what they want to think." Adding, "our job in Washington is to listen to the American people."
Another listener, it seems, is Minnesota congresswoman and Tea Party favourite Michele Bachmann. Asked whether she believes Obama is a Christian and a native-born American, she replied: "Well, that isn't for me to state. That's for the president to state."
The Republican majority leader in the House, Eric Cantor, is defending the birthers from calumny: "I don't think it's nice to call anyone crazy," he said.
While presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been talking about Obama's "Kenyan, anti-colonial mentality."
As for Sarah Palin, the Tea Party queen now dismisses the matter of Obama's birth and faith, calling it a "distraction."
But she is on record in 2009 saying, "I think the public is rightfully making it an issue, I have no problem with that. I think that our campaign, the McCain-Palin campaign, didn't do a good enough job in that area."
A decent man
Perhaps Palin was referring to McCain's principled rebuke of a voter at a town hall meeting in 2008 who claimed that Obama was "an Arab."
No, he is not, retorted McCain, grabbing back the mike and saying that Obama is "a decent family man and citizen."
Arab-Americans may have found it a bit off-putting that an Arab might not be considered a decent family man and citizen, but most people understood what McCain was trying to say.
But then, that's the sort of remark that earned McCain the nickname "McLame" among GOP hardliners. It's not hard to imagine the old guard's logic: Why emulate a loser?
Karl Rove gets it, though. George W. Bush's former chief strategist remains as rigidly partisan as ever but he, too, seems to have been imagining jubilant scenarios in the Oval Office over this birther business.
"They're happy to have this controversy continue," he said on Fox News recently, "because every moment the conservatives talk about this, they marginalize themselves and diminish themselves in the minds of independent voters."
Amen, Brother Rove. Or al-Hamdullillah, as they say in other parts of the world.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/03/07/f-rfa-macdonald.html
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