Last week's drama showed us a powerful man being bullied, and ultimately the peer pressure got him. He had many options for how to or not to respond, but this was not a game he could win. If Obama continued ignoring the birth certificate issue, it would have dogged him, perhaps even stained his legacy. His critics created this rhetorical situation; in his response, a quick morning press conference, the President hoped to deflate critics by framing their preoccupation with his birth certificate as a petty distraction against a backdrop of serious issues: Unemployment, inflation, increasing poverty, decreasing wages, budget and class wars. Obama still failed to make this point.
Some observers accuse his critics, called "birthers”, of racism, of casting Obama as The Other. Probably some of them are racists. But more to the point, I see doubts about his citizenship as attacks on his legitimacy. He’s not my President, they say. The motivation is partisanship more than racism.
In the wake of the 2000 election, about half the voting public remained unconvinced of George W. Bush’s legitimacy. Hell, they questioned his legitimacy as a Texan.
The legitimacy of power should be called into question. Problem is, it isn’t the President who is in power.
