Could Birthers Help Obama?

One of the strangest political storylines of the past three years has been the "birther" movement. For those of you who are unfamiliar, this is a group of conservatives who doubt whether President Barack Obama was actually born in Hawaii and if he is a U.S. citizen. The following article by Albert Hunt at Bloomberg is an excellent piece about how this controversy may actually hurt Republicans in the 2012 election as political candidates (i.e. - Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, Mike Huckabee) may lose independent voters who feel that birthers hold views that are too extreme for mainstream politics. It is interesting to note that the Koch brothers, billionaires who are extremely powerful in conservative politics, have played a key role in keeping the birth certificate debate going over the past several years. Here are some great excerpts from the article and I encourage you to read the whole piece at the following link.

• Obama’s father left when he was two years old and only saw his son once briefly after that. The president never lived in Kenya and didn’t even visit that country until he was 26. He was born in Hawaii, as the state has certified, and two Honolulu newspapers published announcements after his birth in August 1961...For this to amount to a conspiracy, as the birthers charge, would entail a diabolical plot hatched in 1961 that includes faux baby announcements.
• The Koch brothers may be on shaky ground in stressing the influence of Obama’s absentee father. Their father, Fred Koch, was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, whose leader accused Eisenhower, a Republican president and the Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, of being a “tool of the Communists.”
• The problem for the opposition party is that while most Americans, including a decisive majority of independent voters, reject these extreme views, a sizable chunk of core Republican voters don’t. A survey this year by Public Policy Polling of Raleigh, North Carolina, found that a majority of Republicans who say they intend to vote in the presidential primaries don’t think Obama was U.S.-born. A Pew Research Center poll last year showed that nearly one-third of Republicans believe the president, a churchgoing Christian, is a Muslim.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-03/birthers-hijacking-debate-may-be-boon-for-obama-commentary-by-albert-hunt.html