Reader says Hillary Slide in the Polls ;Time to dredge up the old birther attack…

Reader says Hillary Slide in the Polls ;Time to dredge up the old birther attack…

Ridgewood NJ, Journalists lashed out at Donald Trump on Friday after the GOP presidential nominee used his “major announcement” to get more than 25 minutes of free airtime on major cable news networks.”We all got Rickrolled and played,” lamented CNN’s Jake Tapper, referring to a popular bait-and-switch internet meme.

In his 2012 article , “The Democratic Roots of the Birther Movement”  , author Joshua Green sums it up best :

The idea that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and is therefore an illegitimate president—an idea thoroughly discredited after Obama released his long-form birth certificate last year—was mainlined into the femoral artery of the presidential campaign on Tuesday, as Mitt Romney prepared for his high-profile fundraiser in Las Vegas with Donald Trump. Trump is the loudest, brashest, most insistent exponent of “birtherism,” and Romney’s public embrace of him has brought it roaring back. “Is it the most important thing?” Trump said on CNBC on Tuesday. “In a way it is, because you’re not allowed to be president if you’re not born in the country.”

Green goes with the historic details ; “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].” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-05-30/the-democratic-roots-of-the-birther-movement

Trump received a ton of free press today when he declared that President Obama was born in the United States, after raising doubts for years about whether he is an American citizen.