The Boy Who Cried Birther

For the next five-and-a-half months, we’ll be hearing plenty from, and about, the birthers—those people still clinging to the many-times-debunked idea that President Obama isn’t eligible to hold his office. And we will, no doubt, hear from plenty of Republicans who ought to know better who’ll pander to the birthers, or use the birthers’ theories to encourage the belief that Obama is in some way un-American, or drop hints about what else we might not know about him. And we’ll see some of those people forgiven their birtherism, or birther-flirting, and embraced by leaders of the G.O.P. (See Trump, Donald.)

But Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, who’s been the target of liberal ire since last week for supposedly embracing birtherism and even considering keeping Obama off his state’s ballot, isn’t a birther. He just plain got a raw deal. He got that raw deal because of a simple truth likely to play a role in shaping coverage of the election all the way through to November: liberals have almost as much—in some cases maybe even just as much—to gain from hyping birtherism and other stories of the right-wing fringe as conservatives do.

There’s no denying the basic facts that got Bennett in trouble. Yes, he asked Hawaii to verify that Obama was born there in 1961. And yes, he said that there was a possibility that he could keep Obama off the ballot if he didn’t get some verification that the President is, as the Constitution requires, a natural-born citizen. It was easy to jump from there to the conclusion that he’s a full-on birther, conducting a rigged investigation like his fellow Arizonian, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Coincidentally, Kelefa Sanneh has an article about Arizona politics in the magazine this week that’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand just what exactly is going on there.) But a real, objective look at what Bennett was saying would have quickly shown that he isn’t a birther—a fact he kept insisting on, to no avail—and also that he’s been playing a little game, that he had his cards laid out on the table the whole time for anyone who wanted to actually look at them.

Bennett tried to get cute. After his office was hit with more than a thousand emails in the wake of an Arpaio press conference, he thought he’d found a neat little solution in Hawaii law that would get the birthers off his back. He thought he could ask Hawaii for a “verification in-lieu of certified copy”—basically a pinky swear, by email, that the state has Obama’s birth certificate on file, something a real birther would never have accepted—and that once he had that in hand, he could get the birthers to go away. (Bennett’s communications director didn’t respond to an email seeking an interview, but this is all easily reconstructed from comments Bennett has made to local outlets.)

It was the wrong thing to do. There is no doubt—none—that Obama was born where he says he was, and that he is rightfully President. And other Presidential candidates are not treated this way; the fact that Obama has been is unquestionably due to racism and ethnocentrism. And it was a dumb thing to do. The birthers would never have been mollified by Bennett’s actions; it’s more likely that they’d be enraged. It was not, however, the kind of thing a birther would do. But it became a national story just the same. Why? Because, simply put, birtherism is great for business.

Anger is a great motivator. Political campaigns rake in the money when their supporters are enraged at their opponents; media outlets that lean to one side or the other often do best when their audience is looking for a fight. (If you’ve ever been puzzled as to why Glenn Beck was such a success on Fox News for a little while, this is your answer.) And birtherism inspires a whole lot of anger on the left. That’s why, when there are more birther outbursts as Election Day draws closer, you’re likely to see the Romney campaign running for the hills—and people from the Obama campaign gladly talking about them. Now that they’re reasonably sure independents don’t doubt the President’s eligibility, they can use the issue to excite a comparatively apathetic base, and do some fundraising. It’s why you’re far more likely to see the issue come up on MSNBC than you are to see it on Fox News. And it’s why, if you were paying attention, you saw Talking Points Memo and its blogs—which were driving forces behind the Bennett controversy—beating this particular story to death.

By my count, over the six days between May 18, when TPM started covering Bennett, and yesterday, its blogs devoted at least thirteen posts either fully or partly to the story. That’s more than three posts per business day, and that number doesn’t include one post about the state of the birther controversy generally and another that was just the document Bennett received from Hawaii. They weren’t doing all that work just for their health.

Photograph by Obama Presidential Campaign/AP Photo.