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Plus, they're "cranks."
Peter Wehner: The GOP and the Birther Trap - WSJ.com
Thanks to Donald Trump—real-estate mogul, reality-TV star, and possible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination—a fringe conspiracy theory is now front and center in American politics: the claim that President Barack Obama might not be a natural-born American citizen.
By focusing on Mr. Obama's birth certificate, Mr. Trump has garnered a lot of attention and some support. According to the latest CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, among Republicans he is now tied with Mike Huckabee as the most popular prospective GOP presidential nominee. If responsible Republicans don't speak out immediately against Mr. Trump's gambit, it will do substantial damage both to their party and to American politics.
The Trump case goes like this: Mr. Obama doesn't have a birth certificate, his grandmother has stated that he was born in Kenya, his family is fighting over which Hawaii hospital Mr. Obama was born in, and "nobody knew" Mr. Obama while he was growing up in Hawaii.
The problem is that Mr. Trump is wrong on every particular. ...
The problem for Republicans is that some significant figures within the party are giving a wink and a nod to his efforts. Sarah Palin has said, "I believe [Mr. Obama] was born in Hawaii," but in recent days she also said, "More power to [Mr. Trump]. He's not just throwing stones from the sidelines, he's digging in, he's paying for researchers to find out why President Obama would have spent $2 million to not show his birth certificate." (Ms. Palin has refused journalists' requests to explain where the $2 million figure comes from.)
Representative Michele Bachmann (R., Minn.) has said that she takes the president at his word and doesn't care about the issue. But she has added: "The president just has to give proof and verification, and there it goes"—even though proof and verification have already been given.
When prominent figures in a party play footsie with peddlers of paranoia, the party suffers an erosion of credibility. While certain corners of a party's base might be energized by conspiracy theories, the majority of the electorate will be turned off by them. People are generally uneasy about political institutions that give a home to cranks.
There's more than a partisan cost to all this. Mr. Trump is succumbing to a pernicious temptation in American politics: not simply to disagree with political opponents, but to try to delegitimize them. The argument isn't simply that Mr. Obama is wrong on almost every public policy matter (which I believe he is). Rather, the argument is that his presidency is unconstitutional and that he is alien.
Something like this happened with Mr. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, who inspired such rage in some of his critics that they deemed his presidency illicit.
In self-governing societies, there have to be unwritten rules by which we abide. Among them is that we accept the outcome of elections and keep our public debates tethered to reality. ...
Mr. Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, led the Office of Strategic Initiatives in the George W. Bush administration.
Peter Wehner: The GOP and the Birther Trap - WSJ.com