Obama birther story won’t die

OPINION:

The false story of Barack Obama’s birth is the story that just won’t die. It’s apparently too valuable to too many people to put it in the graveyard of myths, fables and convenient tall tales.

By now nearly everyone agrees that little Barack, or “Barry” as he was known to his friends as a boy, was born in a hospital in Honolulu in the summer of ’61. An application for a long-form birth certificate put an end to the questions about the place of his birth, but it has not put an end to the story that won’t die.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign revived it last week, scolding Donald Trump for continuing to suggest that maybe the president was born in Kenya, and on Friday the Donald, digressing from a speech about veterans and whose general was endorsing whom, he addressed the so-called “birther issue.”

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign in 2008 started the birther controversy,” he said. “I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again. Thank you very much.”

President Obama himself said he thought the campaign should get back to more important things. But in suburban Washington, where she was campaigning for Hillary Clinton, the first lady, Michelle Obama, had apparently not got the memo. She said nice things about Hillary, and added this: “Then, of course, there were those who questioned, and continue to question for the past eight years up to this very day, whether my husband was even born in this country. Well, during his time in office, I think Barack has answered those questions with the example he’s set by going high when they go low.”

Breitbart News said it had “long documented that Hillary Clinton supporters were the original ’birthers,’ [pushing the story in 2008] and [Mr.] Obama himself muddied the waters by allowing his literary agent to claim for years that he had been ’born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia.’” Breitbart reported Friday that it had obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts [Mr.] Obama as “born in Kenya and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia.”

Indeed, Mr. Obama has often revised his biography, depending on the campaign needs at hand. He wrote eloquently in his autobiography, “Dreams of My Father,” about a youthful girlfriend who turned out to be “an amalgam” of several girlfriends. This was not a serious offense, we suppose; many men have had difficulty keeping “amalgams” of old girlfriends straight, and a good thing, too. Wives as well as old girlfriends can be unforgiving even of “amalgams.”

On another occasion in 2012, the president was featured in a campaign video in support of his health-care plan, relating the story of how his mother, as she lay dying, had fought greedy insurance companies over coverage of her cancer treatment. The Washington Post investigated, and pronounced the story misleading, a nice way of saying it wasn’t so. Four years earlier, after his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, famously prayed not that God bless America, as clergymen do, but “God damn America.” The president first defended his pastor, if not his prayer. “I can no more disown [the pastor] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” But several weeks later, he did, and left the church.

This is all old news, as Hillary might say, and indeed it was until she tried to resuscitate it last week. She meant only to refresh the record, she said, not to add to the rancor of what is becoming an exceedingly rancorous presidential campaign. We have Hillary’s word on that. Isn’t Hillary’s word enough?