The left started the whole "obama isn't a
real American, doesn't have fundamental thinking of American values " back in 2008 as a way to push hillary as being "more authentic" (born in the middle of America to a middle class family, etc. ) so people would identify with her. Republicans jumped on that and took it the birther route. If Republicans who went the birther route are racist then so are th hillarybots who started it, who planted the seeds. Right?
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The idea of going after Obama’s otherness dates back to the last presidential election—and to Democrats.
Long before Trump started in, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, recognized this potential vulnerability in Obama and sought to exploit it. In a March 2007
memo to Clinton (that later found its way to me), Penn wrote: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared toward showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting it in a new light,” he wrote. “Save it for 2050.
It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.”
Penn also suggested how the campaign might take advantage of this. “Every speech should contain the line that you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century,” he advised Clinton. “And talk about the basic bargain as about [sic] the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child, and that drive you today.” He went on:
“Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t … Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds [of campaign events].”
Penn was not a birther. His memo didn’t raise the issue of Obama’s citizenship. Furthermore, he was acutely aware of the political danger that a Democrat would court by going after Obama in this way, even subliminally: “We are never going to say anything about his background,” he wrote. Still,
his memo is the earliest example of a strategy that metastasized. The Republican tactic has been to make explicit what Penn intended to be merely implicit—and then carry it to its furthest extreme. Soon, the belief spread among many voters that Obama had been educated in a radical madrassa, that he was secretly a Muslim, and, finally, that he had not even been born in the U.S."
The Democratic Roots of the Birther Movement