Most of the “polls” on this web site have outcomes that are not very surprising, but the one about what people believe about President Obama’s birth certificate surprised me. While this site is mostly people of the Conservative persuasion (just look at the program popularity stats), my impression was this issue was pretty much over.
A very large percentage of people voting in the poll believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya and something needs to be done about that.
One thing I would like to point out – having spent a summer of my youth shuffling forms as a summer intern at a Social Security office. Many people are misunderstanding what that green “birth certificate” presented by the Obama campaign is. Most people now understand it is not his actual birth certificate, but rather a document issued by the State of Hawaii saying that his birth was registered there.
What is setting some people off in the wrong direction is they don’t realize this was a document printed recently. It isn’t one he has been carrying around in his wallet for 40 years. How do I know that? Government forms always have a date down at the bottom that is the “revision” date of when the blank form was designed. The office person who keeps track of forms looks at that date to decide which are obsolete forms that need to be destroyed.
In the lower left corner, it says OHSM 1.1 (Rev 11/01) LASER
This indicates this form was created by the Office of Health Status Monitoring version 1.1, that has been in use since November 2001. So the ideas of “they didn’t have laser printers in 1961”, etc… are misguided. This is very different than the Rathergate document which purported to be an actual document created in the 1960s on a typewriter.
One of the unpublished “suggsted answers” to the poll was “Yeah, but what about McCain?”
There are some important differences between Obama and McCain:
- Both of McCain’s parents were US Citizens all of their lives
- McCain was not “born in Panama”, he was born on a US Military base in the Panama Canal Zone, which was US territory at the time
- John McCain’s did not go to live with a stepfather in another country and change his name
I’m personally more troubled that his elementary school education occured in Indonesia, and his view of the United States and knowledge of U.S. history was learned in a country that has historically not looked favorably on the United States. His mistakes about US history and basic civics (that Presidents don’t make laws, and can’t delete items from appropriations bills) are things that could hurt the country over the next 4 years.