This is the long form summary (weird huh?) of the most common questions and known answers with respect to Mr. Obama's eligibility for the Office of the President. For a shorter version please see Top 10 unanswered Obama history questions.
The issue is whether or not Mr. Obama meets the eligibility criteria laid out for the presidency in the Constitution of the United States.
This matters because the Constitution represents ultimate law in the United States - and if Mr. Obama is not eligible for the office he pretends to, then all orders and legislation bearing his signature and/or those of his appointees - including Obamacare, the auto industry transfers and closures, the START treaty, his judicial appointments, and multiple orders issued by the FCC, EPA, and Justice Department - would have no power in law.
Mr. Obama's supporters maintain that his eligibility is a complete non issue; that the 2008 vote trumps the constitution; and that even if the unimaginable happened, Mr. Biden would simply sign all existing legislation, appointments, and orders to allow the administration to continue unchanged.
Mr. Obama's detractors generally say that it is not clear what would happen if Congress or the judiciary declared Mr. Obama ineligible for the office he pretends to, but note that his selection of Mr. Biden as his vice presidential nominee would itself be void along with his cabinet appointments - and therefore that the house could have to choose between making its speaker president or declaring the 2008 election for McCain/Palin.
Note: many on both sides seem to agree that it shouldn't matter where a person is born or who the parents are - that what matters is who the person is and what that person does. Where this argument comes up, Mr. Obama's supporters generally try to draw the conclusion that constitutional eligibility discussions are anachronistic and therefore of interest only to social luddites. Some birthers do fit this model and many clearly do not like Mr. Obama, but the concerns they express are ultimately more about the role of law in a constitutional republic then they are about Mr. Obama personally.
Birthers say no: that most of the questions surrounding Mr. Obama's eligibility have nothing to do with his place of birth - they say, for example, that if his life story as he's told it is true, then he is not a natural born citizen and is therefore constitutionally ineligible for the Office of the Presidency.
His supporters, however, label birthers far right lunatics, accuse them of racism, and try to limit discussion to Mr. Obama's place of birth.
There have been dozens of cases brought. So far all of those based on events or actions related to Mr. Obama's status prior to and including his current claimed incumbency have been dismissed without discovery or hearing on the merits. Recently, for example, the the supreme court rejected, without comment, hearing an appeal against a rather obviously frivolous ruling dismissing one of these cases (Hollister).
There is a partial listing and discussion of these cases here.
To Mr. Obama's supporters the Hollister case was baseless and repugnant, but his detractors point out that the two Obama appointees to the court do not appear to have recused themselves from this decision - something which, if true, opens them to impeachment in the house and subsequent trial in the senate.
Several organizations, led by the Liberty legal foundation, are trying to have the courts order the Democratic Party to prove its presidential candidate for 2012 eligible. As of February 2nd, 2012, cases were pending in six states with about more eight in pre-filing development. These cases depend on the constitutional definition of the term "natural born citizen" as one of the Article Two eligibility requirements for the office of the President.
On February 3rd, Judge Michael W. Malihi of the Georgia state Office of State Administrative Hearings ruled, after an earlier hearing on the merits of the case, that Mr. Obama qualifies as a natural born citizen and is therefore eligible for the office of the President.
Note: The Malihi ruling angered many of Mr. Obama's critics and went largely unreported, as had the case itself, in the pro Obama media. It may be, however, that this verdict is not what it seems.
The reason for this is that Mr. Malihi's court is quite junior and charged, in this situation, only with advising the Secretary of State on eligibility and related issues, not with determining ballot eligibility. For this reason Mr. Obama's attornies boycotted Mr. Malihi's court and asked, instead, that the Secretary of State simply quash the hearing. When he refused, the Secretary of State appeared to give credit to Georgia law but left open the opportunity to over rule Mr. Malihi later to allow Mr. Obama on the ballot.
Because the Superior court has to judge an appeal on the law and the facts in the record, Mr. Malihi's reliance on weak, and most probably mis-construed, precedent drawn from outside the hearing record suggests that the appeals court will reverse - and because that reversal will come after the Secretary of State acts on Mr. Malihi's findings, the actual judgment will overturn the Secretary of State's action in placing Mr. Obama's name on the ballot. As a result Mr. Obama will either have to accept a precedent that could easily lead many states to follow Georgia's example; instigate a Supreme Court hearing on the merits; resign; or, find a way to fight the issue outside, and in defiance of, established legal structures.
For a briefing on the grounds and processes affecting presidential impeachment please see this Washington Post reprint of a 1974 report by the Senate Judiciary Committee examining "the history, grounds, and proper uses of impeachment".
Mr. Obama's supporters say there can be no impeachment on eligibility either because he is eligible or because there is no constitutional process through which an impeachment on eligibility grounds can be brought to the house.
Note: the constitutional protections offered the President draw a bright line between what is criminal and what is impeachable - and limit the processes through which a president can be removed from office to impeachment in the House and subsequent trial in the Senate. Thus the courts cannot remove Mr. Obama from office or impose penalties taking effect during his term of office - and the house cannot impeach him for criminal acts, such as fraudulent use of a social security number; release of a forged birth certificate; or, knowingly accepting illegal campaign contributions, committed prior to his taking of the oath of office.
The House and Senate can, however, act on malfeasance while in office and thus impeach and try him on eligibility grounds because he failed to resign immediately after swearing in - because his stated beliefs about his father's British citizenship make him ineligible for the office under Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution he would have just sworn to defend.
This has two less obvious consequences:
Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution requires that:
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; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
The distinction between legal and natural born citizenship is simple: an immigrant, or an immigrant's child, can become a citizen through a process of law; but someone born to parents living in a country of which they're both citizens is naturally a citizen of that country because citizenship is established without reference to law.
The usage survives most clearly in the phrase "natural justice" -the idea that some things are just naturally moral and right regardless of what the law has to say. See this discussion for some background.
Since the requirement is that both parents be American citizens, Mr. Obama's detractors point to his claim that his father was Mr. Obama Sr., then a British citizen of East African origin, and say that his ineligibility for the Office of the Presidency is about as black and white as constitutional law gets.
His supporters argue, however, that the Constitution does not itself define "natural born citizen" and therefore that this clause may now be understood as requiring nothing more than birth on American soil, and/or that having an American mother suffices, and/or that subsequent constitutional change, and/or precedent and/or Supreme Court rulings, vitiate this requirement to leave Mr. Obama eligible for the office he holds.
His detractors, however, point to this from Vattel's The Law of Nations (1756) (and later supporting material from Supreme court rulings, from Representative John Bingham, (primary author of the 14th amendment) and from the senate resolution on Mr. McCain's eligibility sponsored by senators Clinton and Obama):
The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.
(Note that the Vattel reference in Article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power.. To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against The Law of Nations.
demonstrates the founder's familiarity with this work.)
Notice that Mr. Obama's place of birth and legal citizenship have nothing to do with this issue - because the issue here is how he obtained whatever rights of citizenship he may have, not whether he has them.
Notice too that the underlying dispute is not about what the founders meant by the term "natural born citizen" - the historical record on this is clear and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled (e.g. 56. Murray v Hoboken Land Co., 52 U.S. (18 How.) 272 (1856); Davidson v New Orleans, 96 U.S. 97 (1878); Amith v Alabama, 124 U.S. 465 (1888) that constitutional language, if left undefined in the document itself, must be interpreted according to the understanding of the "educated man" at the time of the founding.
Thus the real dispute here is between people who see law as a fixed set of rules applicable to all until formally changed, and those who want to see the meaning of existing law evolve, without formal amendment, as their perception of society changes.
No.
Consider, for example, this bit from an August 4th, 2010 report by KLTV's Tim Bueller on a poll done by CNN:
A new poll by CNN, whose editorial commentary largely supports President Obama and his policies, delivered some bad news on his apparent birthday today: 6 of 10 people are uncertain the president was even born in the United States.The poll was taken July 16-21 of 1,018 adults, including 335 Democrats and 285 Republicans. It has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
The question was: "Do you think Barack Obama was definitely born in the United States, probably born in the United States, probably born in another country, or definitely born in another country?"
Definitely in the United States got the vote from 42 percent of the respondents, and probably in the United States another 29 percent.
But that leaves almost 6 of 10 Americans uncertain about the president's birth, and therefore his eligibility under the U.S. Constitution even to be president.
Sixteen percent said Obama probably was born in another nation, and 11 percent said he definitely was born somewhere other than the U.S.
Breaking it down, 64 percent of Democrats believe he definitely was born in the U.S., leaving more than 1 in 3 Democrats not sure. For independents, 37 percent believe he definitely was born in the U.S., leaving some 2 in 3 unsure. For members of the GOP, not even 1 in 4 (23 percent) believes Obama definitely was born in the U.S.
Fully 41 percent of the GOP believe he definitely or probably was born outside the United States. That's nearly 30 percent for Independents.
Notice that this poll over sampled Democrats, was limited to the birth place issue, mis-states the eligibility issue, is reported in a way that obfuscates some results, and nevertheless shows that a majority among those polled share at least some birther concerns.
For example, when the DebbieSchlussel blog raised questions about Mr. Obama's selective service registration the story couldn't have been better tailored to appeal to those eager to validate negative beliefs about Mr. Obama - and was much better supported than Mr. Rather's false accusations, late in the 2004 election run-up, against then President Bush. In contrast to the eager acceptance Mr. Rather found among Mr. Kerry's media supporters, however, birthers almost unanimously evaluated the evidence for Mr. Obama's fraudulent selective service registration as speculative; accepted that innocent explanations, however improbable, are possible; and gave Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt.
The usual response to birtherism from Mr. Obama's supporters has been to delegitimize both the issue and the people raising it - generally asserting: first, that birther issues are of interest only to the lunatic fringe; and, second, that the issue is limited to Mr. Obama's place of birth.
Among the polls listed in this February 14th, 2011 WND story, for example, only the one by the pro-Obama Public Policy organization was widely reported by Mr. Obama's media supporters - according to his detractors precisely because its limitation to birth place related opinion among Republican primary voters fulfilled their preferred narrative.
For the complete Joe Arpaio please see one or more of these search results.
In brief: Sheriff Joe Arpaio is the self-described "toughest sheriff in America". He has been under democrat and media attack for decades, but is consistently re-elected by his constituents in Arizona's Maricopa County. In late 2011 he asked a number of former and serving law enforcement officers and lawyers to form an unpaid "cold case posse" to investigate citizen complaints alleging Mr. Obama's ineligibility for the office he pretends to.
Key findings announced to date (March 22/12) include:
Note: The recent conviction of a self described "fanatical Obama supporter" on charges of threatening to kill Mr. Arpaio has gone essentially unreported in the same mainstream media that erupted in anti-Palin fervor after another far left lunatic attacked Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Almost everyone agrees that Mr. Obama would not be eligible for the Office of the Presidency if he were not born in the United States; he has refused to release original birth certification; and the missing birth certificate has therefore become a subject for speculation.
The major media players supporting Mr. Obama generally denigrate those questioning his eligibility for office as "birthers" (a smearing reference to 9/11 "truthers"), and pretend that the issue is limited to speculation that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya, but this both elides and misrepresents birther concerns.
In reality most birthers agree that Mr. Obama's eligibility for the Office of the President would only rest on his place of birth if that place of birth was provably not in the United States.
Thus some birthers really believe he was born in what is now Kenya, but the majority see the missing birth certificate as little more than an easily publicized example of all the personal history documentation presidential candidates, including McCain/Palin, usually provide but Mr. Obama has not.
Basically, most birthers are far less concerned about where he was actually born than they are about the mass media's refusal to do its job in bringing information about Mr. Obama to the public; about the democratic party's willingness to abandon constitutional law for partisan advantage; and, about the general refusal by both the legislative and judicial branches to enforce the Constitution against Mr. Obama and the Democratic party.
On April 27, 2011, The White House press office released, apparently on Mr. Obama's behalf, electronic copies of what is said to be Mr. Obama's long form birth certificate.
The salient points are that:
The same journalist supporters who saw the 2008 COLB offered by the the DailyKos as the definitive birth certificate now see this as the definitive birth certificate and greeted its appearance with a co-ordinated, multi-media, "full court press" aimed at ridiculing and marginalizing birthers - a push that focused on ridicule, avoided mention of the natural born issue to the point of removing information about it from public sources such as wikipedia, and culminated by trumpeting the results of a poll, contracted from a pro-obama polling organization by a pro-obama media group as showing that only 3% of Americans believe Mr. Obama foreign born.
His detractors point out, however:
but is at variance with the White House claim that the new birth certificate image was created by scanning an original document.
Note: The use of computerized digital records management software for legal document issuance and tracking became very popular in the mid to late 1990s as state and municipal governments sought to cut costs and improve services - but divorcing document issuance from source document review made the creation of false identities so easy that the post 9/11 DHS encouraged issuing agencies to replace these applications with fully image based systems storing, and reproducing, entire images of the original documents.
It is thought that the Sunahara child experienced breathing difficulties at birth, was almost immediately transferred to the Queens Medical Center and, a few hours later, moved to the Kapiolani center in Honolulu where she died in the early hours of Sunday, August 6th.
Thus some of Mr. Obama's detractors speculate that Queens filed the birth paperwork accompanying the child, that Kapiolani filed the death certificate, and that the Department of Health matched these to produce the formal birth and death certificates after processing the Kapilolani updates from the August 5/6th weekend.
In their view Mr. Obama's adoption of Ms. Sunahara's birth certificate number is consistent with his long association with Bill Ayers (who brags about committing identity theft using certificates for dead children); exactly matches expectations on how image database systems of the type apparently used to produce the birth certificate are abused by identity thieves; explains Mr. Obama's earlier claims to have been born at Queens Medical instead of the Kapiolani; and, explains the otherwise impossible - the fact that his registration number follows those issued to the Nordyke twins despite being dated three days earlier.
Most of these claims are based on image artifacts natural to images produced by a mid nineties, PC style, "object database" document management system of the type Hawaii is known to have spent money on. For example, the font differences between the "a" in the typewritten word "Male" and the typewritten word "Kapiolani" fall into this category.
Some image artifacts cannot, however, be easily produced in this way but are consistent with the assumption that Hawaii's good faith digital issuance process relied on source documents that had been altered prior to digitization. For example, the inhuman precision of the mother's signature (in which the bottoms of the letters line up to within 1/240th of an inch) cannot easily be explained as either a scanner or digital assembly artifact, but is consistent with the assumption that the source document has been altered.
To his detractors these problems mean that the White House released birth certificate image raises more questions than it answers and is of no probative value because unaccompanied by certified copies of the original documentation.
There are two controversies here:
The answer to the first question is unambiguously No - the Hawaiian COLB documented resident children up to one year of age regardless of their place of birth and is not proof of Hawaiian birth.
The story behind the COLB pointed to as a birth certificate by Mr. Obama's supporters is that Hawaii computerized its birth records circa 2001; sometime later someone authorized by Mr. Obama asked for this COLB; the state complied by producing a printed copy of the electronic record; and the document as presented by the DailyKos is a photograph of that printout.
There are two problems with this:
To Mr. Obama's supporters these problems signify nothing; to his detractors they discredit both the documents and the people putting them forward.
It seems possible that Hawaii really did issue both the COLB and the long form birth image and, therefore, thast the anomalies on them can be understood as the natural result of mid 90s document management software based on storing text and image pieces on a server, and then re-assembling those for output on a PC. If so, however, the use of the composite image in place of the original contravenes Hawaii's records management legislation - and thus renders both documents legally suspect.
Specifically, the covering legislation most often cited by Obama apologists, Act 177, Session laws of Hawaii, authorizes the use of an electronic record in place of the original (or a microfilm of the original) but requires that electronic record to "accurately reflect the information in the original thereof in all details" - and no application reconstructing images from stored text and image components can meet that standard.
An actual, unmodified, high-resolution, long form birth certificate image produced by scanning an original meets this standard; but the one delivered by the White House was clearly not produced in this way and differs from it's claimed original in, at the very least: the fonts used, the appplication of NT style kerning, the spatial relationships between components, the use of an updated hospital name, the physician's signature (because real signatures change over time, but the single examplar used to minimize storage requirements does not), and the use of an updated racial group label ("African" in place of "Negro" or "Negroid").
It is possible, in other words, for the long form image to be legitimate in the sense that they were issued by the State of Hawaii, and invalid under Hawaiian state law.
Hawaiian law prohibits the disclosure of this type of information to non family members or others without clearly defined rights to the information. As a result neither the Republican governor of Hawaii when this issue arose nor the then director of Vital Statistics, would release the applicable documentation.
In November of 2010, however, Democrat Neil Abercrombie was elected governor and promised to release Mr. Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate.
In this process he first claimed to have been present at Mr. Obama's birth; then that he knew him as a baby; then that he knew him as a small boy of about five or six; then that he had, as governor, located documents proving the existence of the birth certificate but not the document itself; then that Hawaii doesn't have birth information for Mr. Obama; and, most recently, that he too is prohibited by law from pursuing the issue. Mr. Obama's supporters have been largely silent in response to the Abercrombie follies, with only the most peripheral voicing the usual attacks on all concerned.
Mr. Obama's detractors generally seem to assume Mr. Abercrombie's sincerity. The more paranoid argue, however, that Mr. Abercrombie's known relationships with Mr. Davis and other far left militants invalidate the assumption of good will - and many therefore expect Mr. Abercrombie's eventual announcement that some records, including Mr. Obama's, vanished during the late 90s rush to records digitization to be followed by the discovery of a ballot box stuffed with records - again including Mr. Obama's - in somebody's garage or desk.
A note:
On April 11th, 2010, Ms. Fukino, now a private citizen, contradicted Governer Abercrombie to say first that the original long form birth certificate is in a cabinet at the Department of Health, second that it is half typewritten and half hand-written, and third that Hawaiian law limits the state to providing only the computer generated certification of live birth.
However:
Here are the two official statements by Chiyome Leinaala Fukino M.D., Director, Hawaii Department of Health:
"Therefore, I as Director of Health for the State of Hawaii, along with the Registrar of Vital Statistics who has statutory authority to oversee and maintain these type of vital records, have personally seen and verified that the Hawaii State Department of Health has Sen. Obama's original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures.
And: "I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen," Fukino said in a statement. "I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008, over eight months ago."
To his supporters these announcements confirm the legitimacy of the COLB.
Those questioning his eligibility point out, however:
There are two complicating factors:
In other words it is legally possible (and no information on which to either support or exclude this hypothesis has been published) for Mr. Obama to have been born outside Hawaii and still have obtained valid Hawaiian birth documentation either personally after 1982 or through actions taken by his grandmother in the 1960s.
A birth announcement in two Honolulu newspapers (The Sunday Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin for August 13, and 14, 1961 respectively) reads:
"Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4."
Mr. Obama's supporters say these notices were placed by the Hawaiian department of vital statistics and constitute a clear public record of his American birth.
Detractors, however, point out that the newspaper appears to have "batched" these announcements in the groups in which they were forwarded from various Department of Health offices; that the placement of the Obama notice in the print editions suggests this notice did not reflect a hospital or physician attended birth; and that the announcement must therefore have come from one of the offices set up to bring Hawaiian vital statistics up to federal expectations - offices that were required to document infants of less than one year whose parents or guardians claimed Hawaiian residency.
More, they point out that that the address shown was the grandmother's and never the residence of any of the Obamas; that there is no evidence the marriage took place and so at least the first part of the announcement is a likely lie; and that this date fits better with the theory that the Obamas had someone deliver the child to its grandmother that summer than it does with Ms. Dunham's known presence at the University of Washington in Seattle on August 19, 1961.
Three notes:
The investigative work reported by Arizona Sherrif Joe Arpaio on March 1st, 2012 included this:
To quell the popular idea that Obama was actually born outside the United States, we examined the records of Immigration and Naturalization Service cards routinely filled out by airplane passengers arriving on international flights that originated outside the United States in the month of August 1961 [Obama's birth month]. Those records are housed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Interestingly, records from the days surrounding Obama's birth, August 1, 1961 to August 7, 1961 are missing. This is the only week in 1961 for which these immigration cards cannot be found.
There is no publically known and widely accepted answer. Many of his supporters claim that he has done so - but his detractors say that nothing less than certified copies of original documentation will do.
What is known with certainty is that Mr. Obama and/or his campaign have fought all attempts to obtain the original birth documentation, explicitly instructed the state authorities in Hawaii not to release any applicable documentation, and launched numerous media, personal, and legal attacks on those seeking either the production or clarification of any of the missing documentation including his school, selective service, professional, passport, medical, and financial records.
One response from Mr. Obama's supporters to his ineligibility under the natural born clause of the constitution has been to argue that both the natural born clause and the traditional transmission of citizenship through the father are inappropriate anachronisms in today's society, and therefore that his mother's American citizenship guarantees his eligibility for elected office in the United States.
His detractors point out, however: first that this is an attempt to change the subject rather than a counter-argument; second, that the natural born citizen requirement means, uniquely for elected office in the United States, that mere legal citizenship does not confer eligibility for the Office of the Presidency; and, third, that the applicability of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (1948, 52, and 58) at the time of his birth means that he could not inherit American citizenship from his mother.
The act specifies that an American mother of a child born to a foreign father passes American citizenship to the child only if that mother had been an American resident for at least ten years prior to the birth and over the age of 14 for at least five of those years. Since Mr. Obama's mother was under age at the time of his birth, he cannot claim to have inherited American citizenship from her.
Notice that his place of birth has nothing to do with this issue: the issue is that the mother was not old enough, at the time of his birth, to confer American citizenship on the child.
Some of Mr. Obama's supporters maintain that the 14th Amendment grants him natural born status. In reality it does not: the amendment was intended to regularize the position of former slaves and some others (e.g. treaty Indians) and conferred citizenship only on the children of parents wholly and uniquely subject to U.S. jurisdiction.
As confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1873 (the Slaughter-House cases) and 1884 (Elk v. Wilkins) the 14th Amendment confers U.S citizenship only on those whose parents were under sole and complete American jurisdiction at the time of the birth - and as Mr. Obama gives himself out to have been the child of a British citizen subject to the British Nationality Act of 1948, he cannot also claim to have acquired natural born citizenship under the 14th Amendment.
One investigator, Andy Martin, claims to have unearthed substantive evidence that Mr. Obama was fathered on the then under age Ann Dunham by the well known, well off, well connected, and already married communist leader and civil rights activist Frank Davis.
Although Mr. Martin has not released documentary evidence supporting this hypothesis it is known that:
Since Mr. Davis was an American, and if the baby was born in Hawaii, the claim would, if true, explain why the Hawaiian director of statistics has twice publically released extremely carefully worded statements saying that Mr. Obama's Hawaiian birth documentation exists and, in her most recent comment, that he is a natural born citizen.
His supporters claim, however, that her comments were mistranslated; and/or that she is too old (or too poorly educated) to offer trustworthy testimony; and/or that the woman identified as the paternal grandmother is an imposter.
Both the Kenyan government and the hospital have refused to provide any relevant records while the Department of State both refuses to confirm or deny the existence of relevant records and refuses to provide access to the appropriate records depository.
As is usual in Obama conspiracy theories it is absence of information that fuels speculation. It is not possible to disprove from public records, for example, the claim that Mr. Davis used his connections with communist leaders in British East Africa (particularly the Oginga Odinga group Mr. Obama Sr. was closely associated with and Mr.Obama himself would later campaign for) to arrange for the baby's birth, and adoption by the Obamas, at Mombasa Coastal hospital.
Some Obama supporters claim that much of Mr. Obama's documentation is weak or missing, and much of his background murky, because his family worked for the CIA.
Those who argue this point mainly to coincidence and oddity: that a furniture salesman would move from Seattle to Honolulu and meet Mr. Obama sr; that a woman who worked for banks and courts would move to Indonesia just before the Sukarno government there fell to rioters; that they had family connections to others thought to have been involved in intelligence; and so on.
Mr. Obama's detractors have not responded in any significant way to this story - it should be noted, however, that:
A note: Suspicion on both the anti-Palin astro-turfing effort and the "Obama was CIA" story points at a company called Fenton Communications run by David Fenton - a man said to be a member, along with Bill Ayers and other Obama confidants, of the weathermen.
There are two separate sets of issues here.
Since Mr. Obama was clearly being treated as an Indonesian citizen at the time, the dispute is about whether or not this affects his American status.
Thus his supporters generally claim one or more of the following:
In response his detractors point out that both Indonesian and American law at the time traced natural citizenship, where both parents were known, through the father rather than the mother - and that Indonesian law would therefore have treated the future Mr. Obama as a Kenyan of British citizenship, not as an American.
They say, furthermore, that Indonesian law would not have allowed either the marriage or the school enrollment unless his mother abjured her previous citizenship and proved her commitment to raising her children as Muslims.
At best, therefore, they see Mr. Obama as claiming dual citizenship and, at worst, as an illegal immigrant - and ineligible for office either way regardless of his place of birth or whether his father was Mr. Obama or Mr. Davis.
Three notes:
Most importantly he claimed at an April 6, 2008 fundraiser in San Francisco to understand foreign policy issues related to the Indian sub-continent in particular, and the under developed world in general, because of his extensive travels in Pakistan in 1981. Two days later the Obama campaign confirmed the travel story.
At that time, however, it was illegal under both American and Pakistani law for an American traveling under a non diplomatic American passport to enter Pakistan.
His detractors therefore argue that he must have either used an Indonesian passport or traveled illegally. Either would mark him as ineligible either as a citizen of Indonesia or as a criminal under American and Pakistani law.
His supporters say, however, that this was simply a campaign speech in which the claim made by both Mr. Obama and his senior campaign communications people about having traveled extensively in Pakistan should be treated as merely a nice way to capture and present the essential truth about his foreign policy expertise arising from unsourced knowledge of the way people live in Pakistan, Indonesia, and Africa.
There are many - five examples:
Writer/journalist Jack Cashill believes, as do many others, that the American terrorist, Bill Ayers, wrote most of what Mr. Obama claims as his own.
The basis for this is two fold: first that works like Dreams of my Father reflect themes, styles, and content typical of Bill Ayers; and, second, that nothing unambiguously attributable to Mr. Obama remotely aspires to the quality of writing and thought obvious in the disputed works. For example, the one thing Mr. Obama is claimed to have contributed to the Harvard Law Review during his nominal time there, an unsigned note, is widely considered inconsequential among his supporters and superficial twaddle among his critics.
Many people don't believe Mr. Obama ever attended Columbia University. In the most common variation the belief is that he registered for courses but did not attend classes.
In general the problem is that there is no public record of his transfer from Occidental College; he does not appear in the public records available from Columbia; and, no students or professors there at the time readily admit to remembering him - a black student in an almost all white faculty.
As in most Obama conspiracy theories, secrecy feeds speculation - and his detractors say things simply don't add up. Thus the ascent to Harvard five years after undistinguished Columbia undergraduate work is as unusual as the absence of any public record with respect to his work at either school. Similarly, his marks, his letters of referral, his employment and/or citizenship status at the time, and his LSAT/IQ scores for entry to Harvard are all secret and thus don't contradict the general belief that even the strong affirmative action push at Harvard during the late eighties would not have been enough to get him admitted without significant, overt, support from an important former professor like Columbia's Zbigniew Brzezinski.
His supporters point, however, to the only publicly available record: a mention of his name as one graduate among many in the program for the spring 1983 Columbia undergraduate convocation, as sufficient proof of both attendance and graduation.
It appears likely that Mr. Davis got him into Punahou first and Occidental College later, and used his influence to have fees waived or paid for him at both. Allegations exist, however, that he registered at Occidental as a foreign student to take advantage of financial support for non American citizens.
Further, if he attended Columbia as claimed, no one knows who paid his fees and living costs there, and documented support exists for the belief that both his entry to Harvard and his financial position there were secured for him through Khalid al-Mansour, key advisor to Saudi billionaire Al-Waleed bin Talal -a man who publically blamed the United States for the 9/11 massacre.
Most of Mr. Obama's supporters assume that he has no religious convictions - and see his claim to Christianity as necessary condescension to the prejudices of the uneducated.
His detractors, however, point out that only two things about Mr. Obama's embrace or otherwise of religious belief have been verified:
The social security number issue is that Mr. Obama is thought to use, or to have used, a number issued to a resident of Connecticut in 1976 or 1977, claims to have worked legally in Hawaii two years earlier, was never resident in Connecticut, and may have used different social security numbers in Illinois and/or while attending University.
Mr. Obama's supporters generally say that he worked off the books in 1975; that his 1976/77 number was obtained for him by his father (Mr. Obama Sr.); and that the other social security numbers recorded by the social security administration under the name "Bar[r]ack H. Obama" are coincidences arising from the commonness of the name.
Mr. Obama's detractors say that Mr. Obama Sr. was not in the United States during this period; that most kids get their social security number along with their first jobs; and, that his continuing refusal to release his school and other records speaks to an agenda of concealment they believe relates to his use of multiple social security numbers.
In the absence of information there is widespread speculation - for example, that questions arising with his first job combined with the absence of birth and/or citizenship documentation to lead his grandmother into abusing her access to records and letterhead at the Oahu probate court to have the social security administration assign a number to him.
Note: as of early September 2011 two claimed Obama relatives, an Aunt Zeituni and an Uncle Omar, had been arrested and held as long term illegals living separately in the Maryland state area. Both apparently had false social security identifications, and there are now unconfirmed suggestions that the uncle's includes the Connecticut identifier.
Mr. Obama's supporters generally use the racism charge to silence opponents. Almost all the negative email I have received with respect to this faq, for example, both describes my motivation in writing it as racist and invokes the writer's sure and certain knowledge that mob justice will soon put an end to my obscenity.
Conservatives as a group do not seem to consider Mr. Obama's skin color an issue - but democrats assuredly do. Thus I have never yet seen a conservative article or serious web posting either decrying the election of a black man to the presidency or assailing Mr. Obama personally on racial grounds; but every leading democrat organ, from the New York Times to zdnet, has frequently celebrated both the man and his election on purely racial grounds.
As a result I've come to believe that racism has been a significant factor in Mr. Obama's success. Specifically, I believe that many otherwise intelligent people refuse to discuss Mr. Obama's eligibility for office only because he's half black - that a white man with a similar background would never have received the same pass from the liberal-left media he has; that many of his supporters dismiss the natural born problem because they secretly assume that a young white girl who sought out angry black males wouldn't know who the father was; and that many continue to support him because his failures and deceptions, like affirmative action and the whole "noblesse oblige" idea, justify their perception of themselves as morally and intellectually superior to blacks.
In the absence of real evidence one way or the other on any or all of the issues listed above, there seems to be no objective way to compare the likelihood of any of the scenarios people have built around the facts we have. As a result no one scenario can reasonably be cited as "most likely."
What we do know concerning his mother's behavior, his claims to having been born in two different hospitals, his efforts to suppress information about his past, the interventions on his behalf by America haters (including Frank Davis, Bill Ayers, Khalid al-Mansour, and Jeremiah Wright) and what there is of his public record leads to the conclusion that much of what he says about himself is not true.
Unfortunately, knowing that the moon isn't made from green cheese doesn't tell us what it is made of, so the only things we know for sure are:
It is not known whether original documentation exists. It is not known why Hawaii appears to still be using a widely deprecated technology in the issuance of vital records.
The speculation that staff used the issuance system to produce several "joke" certificates remarkably similar in content and structure to the one released by Mr. Obama's press office is consistent with what is known but has no independent evidentiary support.
It seems likely that Virginia Sunahara was born, was transferred between hospitals, and did die on a timeline that fits the hypothesis that her birth certificate was processed, and the registration number mechanically assigned, immediately after the batch including the Nordyke twins. What that number was is not known.
Questions? Comments? Suggested fixes? murph at winface com, please