Abercrombie takes on Birthers

SUBHEAD: Governor Neil Aberchrombie intends to lay to rest claims that President Obama was not born in Hawaii in 1961.  

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg on 24 December 2010 for New York Times -
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/us/25hawaii.html) 

 
Image above: Then Rep. Neil Aberchrombie at a Obama Ohana rally in January 2008. From (http://www.flickr.com/photos/crispyteriyaki/page267).

Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, who befriended President Obama’s parents when they were university students here, has been in office for less than three weeks. But he is so incensed over “birthers” — the conspiracy theorists who assert that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and was thus not eligible to become president — that he is seeking ways to change state policy to allow him to release additional proof that the president was born in Honolulu in 1961.

“It’s an insult to his mother and to his father, and I knew his mother and father; they were my friends, and I have an emotional interest in that,” Governor Abercrombie said in a telephone interview late Thursday. “It’s an emotional insult. It is disrespectful to the president; it is disrespectful to the office.”

The governor, a Democrat and former congressman, said he has initiated conversations with the state’s attorney general and the chief of its Health Department about how he can release more explicit documentation of Mr. Obama’s birth on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital. He said he has done so of his own accord, without consulting the White House, which declined to comment. “He’s a big boy; he can take sticks and stones. But there’s no reason on earth to have the memory of his parents insulted by people whose motivation is solely political,” Mr. Abercrombie said.

“Let’s put this particular canard to rest.” Mr. Abercrombie was regarded as an independent operator in Congress, a free spirit who embodies his state’s “aloha” tradition of inclusiveness and harmony. He returned a reporter’s phone call at 11:30 p.m. on Thursday — he had just gotten the message, he said, and was worried about deadlines — and spent 30 minutes chatting animatedly about Mr. Obama, Hawaii and his own recent election, saying that he had based his campaign on “our diversity defining us rather than dividing us” — much the same message that Mr. Obama used in 2008. Now that he is in office, Mr. Abercrombie is facing a $71 million deficit this year and 10 times that amount in the years to come.

Mr. Obama talked about the problem at a news conference Wednesday in Washington when he spoke, imprecisely, about “schools that are laying off so many teachers that they start going to four days a week, as they’ve done in Hawaii, for example.” In fact, Hawaii instituted furloughs to avoid layoffs.

Even so, the new governor said he was having the time of his life. “If I was having a better time,” he said, laughing, “I’d have to be arrested.” But on the matter of the birthers, Mr. Abercrombie grew serious. “I’m going to take care of that,” he said, though he acknowledged that they would be difficult to convince.

The birther movement began during the 2008 campaign when some of Mr. Obama’s critics claimed, without offering proof, that he was born in Kenya, like his father, Barack Obama Sr. The elder Mr. Obama was an exchange student at the University of Hawaii when he met and married Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. The Obama campaign ultimately responded by releasing a “certification of live birth,” an official document from the Hawaii Department of Health, and posting it online.

Two fact-checking groups, FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, concluded the document was authentic. A reporter for The Honolulu Advertiser also found two separate newspaper announcements of the president’s birth, one in The Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961, and another in The Honolulu Star-Bulletin the next day. Both carried the words “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, son, Aug. 4.” Still, the questions persisted. The certificate number is blacked out on the Internet copy, and Mr. Obama’s detractors have demanded the release of his original long-form birth certificate, which in Hawaii is not considered a public record.

The state was so besieged by inquiries that Mr. Abercrombie’s predecessor, Linda Lingle, a Republican, signed a law allowing officials to ignore the queries as nuisances. “I certainly hope by the fourth year of our administration that we’ll have dealt with this burgeoning birth controversy,” the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters last year. The fact-checkers at PolitiFact sounded similarly frustrated in a 2009 post: they thought they had put the matter to rest.

“Oh, how naïve we were,” the post’s writer, Robert Farley, said. Mr. Abercrombie, 72, said that although he did not see the elder Obamas at the hospital with their newborn son, he did remember the couple bringing the baby to social events. He says the critics who suggest that Mr. Obama’s mother slipped off to Kenya to give birth are engaging in a “demonological fantasy.” And he is angry about legislation in several states that would require presidential candidates to document that they were born in this country. A similar bill died in Congress last year.

 “My thought was, ‘Wait a minute, why didn’t you ask me, my friends in the national Congress, the House of Representatives?’ ” he said. “They know me, they know that I was here, but they didn’t even bother to have the courtesy to do that, which is disappointing to me, because it is very difficult for me not to conclude that bills like that are meant as a coded message that he is not really American. My thought is, rather than get into some kind of argument or play into that mentality, why not just simply try to authenticate this and let the facts speak for themselves?”

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