American Missive

ATLANTA— If Barack Obama were truly not born in the United States, then why did the McCain campaign not make a bigger stink about this during the election?  Proving Mr. Obama’s ineligibility for the office of president would have been a sure-fire way for the hapless Mr. McCain to squeeze out a victory last Fall.  Mr. McCain never addressed the issue, opting instead to run a very haphazard and occasionally incoherent campaign centered on government waste, Mr. Obama’s celebrity, national defence and the overarching pursuit of maverickiness.

Word came out this week that in fact the McCain campaign did investigate Mr. Obama’s nationality and true birthplace.  According to politicalwire.com:

…David Weigel talked with Trevor Potter and other lawyers for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign who said that they did look into the Obama citizenship rumors and found them without merit.

Said Potter: “To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations. We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere else. On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii. There was a certificate issued by the state’s Department of Health, and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate. There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance.”

I was never fully convinced of this tack of arguing against Mr. Obama’s presidency.   In my mind, the above revelation should be one of the final nails in the coffin.  It really is hard to get around a birth announcement in a newspaper from 47 years ago.

But there are plenty of other reasons to argue against the direction Mr. Obama’s presidency- and we will certainly be doing more of that over the upcoming several years.