Two new polls suggest that the Grand Old Party is having a Grand Old Meltdown over where President Barack Obama was born. Last week, Survey 2000 reported that 28 percent of Republicans in a nationwide survey of 2,400 adults said they did not believe Obama was born in the United States; Tuesday, Public Policy Polling will release results from a survey of 579 voters of Virginia showing that 41 percent of Republicans there think Obama is foreign-born.
To me, the size of this crazy caucus is evidence of a party in crippling, delusional disarray, captives to rumor and irrational hatred.
To certain level-headed Republicans, however, the results are simply the flip side of a 2007 Rasmussen Reports poll that found 35 percent of Democrats answered yes to the question: “Did [President George W.] Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?”
Whatever delusional disarray this may have signaled, they say, the Democrats managed to regroup for 2008.
The analogy is flawed. While I agree that anyone who believes that Bush knew terrorists were going to hijack jets and fly them into great public buildings on Sept. 11, 2001, is a kook, the poll question wasn’t specific on that point. Those who were aware that Bush was briefed in early August 2001 that Al Qaeda was exhibiting “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York,” might well have answered yes.
Indeed, a 2004 Zogby International poll found that 30 percent of Republicans in New York said the Bush administration “knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around Sept. 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act.”
But whatever the actual percentage was of kooky Democratic “truthers,” they never got even close to the mainstream cred now enjoyed by the largely Republican “birthers.” You didn’t find serious lefty pundits or elected Democrats muttering that there were still serious questions about whether Bush was in on the 9/11 plot, or ducking the issue when reporters came to call.
Even still, at least the Democratic wingnuts were obsessing over a gravely serious matter — treason and the deaths of thousands of innocents. The Republican wingnuts are obsessing over what is, at worst, a highly technical violation of one of the ugliest and outmoded passages in our Constitution.
I refer to Article 2, Section 1: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”
They claim, against the vast weight of evidence, that Obama was born when his mother, a U.S. citizen, was overseas. And that under those circumstances, she was three months too young to qualify as the mother of a “natural-born citizen” under the laws in effect at that time. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 gave them the opportunity to make this claim when they added the “natural-born” requirement without debate. It mirrored even tougher citizenship requirements for elected officials in England and “was a response to a legitimate concern at the time,” explained Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet. “There was a tradition in Europe through the middle of the 19th Century for monarchs to install their relatives on the throne of weaker countries. The natural-born citizen requirement came from the fear that such a usurper would become president.”
That fear is long gone. But the requirement remains, now merely a bit of vestigial nativism. It has survived more than two dozen attempts in Congress to remove it through the amendment process, the most recent of which was spearheaded five years ago by … wait for it … Republicans, who were hoping to clear the way for Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for president.
And the attempt was opposed by such Democrats as Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, who declared at a Judiciary Committee hearing, “Your allegiance is driven by your birth.” An infamous slap at naturalized citizens, so many of whom have served our country with such loyalty and distinction? I’d say yes. But a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll at the time found 67 percent of Americans opposed to allowing foreign-born people the right to run for U.S. president. That’s not patriotism, it’s bigotry. We should let it go.
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