Yesterday President Obama released his long form birth certificate, which was at the center of the so-called "birther" controversy. While in theory this should have put the entire disgraceful matter to rest, we quickly learned that we couldn't simply move on and try to regain our national dignity. As soon as the document they clamored for was released, rather than apologizing for perpetrating a fraud on the American public, these same people resorted to everything from saying it was a fake to calling for President Obama's college transcripts.
With regard to the latter, Donald Trump claims to have heard that Barack Obama was a "terrible student" who somehow mysteriously got into Columbia and Harvard. Of course this is unsourced and is either based on hearsay of indeterminate reliability, or it's simply a bald-faced lie contrived in Trump's own mind. When assessing how seriously to take this accusation, we need to consider two things. First, since nothing Trump said about the birth certificate, what his investigators were finding, the birth announcement, and so forth had any truth to it whatsoever, we need to evaluate anything he says with the harsh scrutiny that we reserve exclusively for those who have lied to us. Secondly, the one thing we do know about Barack Obama's academic record is that he graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the law review. This would suggest that President Obama was a superb student, not a terrible one.
Moreover, for the sake of argument, I'll even entertain the possibility that Donald Trump isn't lying, and that in his youth Barack Obama wasn't the academic star that he later indisputably became. To a reasonable American, the arc of this story would actually flatter Mr. Obama. He took a weakness of his youth, and worked at it until he was not only no longer weak, but he had excelled to the point that he was among the very best in the nation. We don't condemn that; we celebrate it. However, this is still grist for Mr. Trump's deplorable mill.
What Trump is saying loud and clear to his receptive audience is that this _______ (you know the word) only got where he got in life by being unqualified but stealing what rightly belonged to a deserving white person. Not only do Trump's supporters instantly decode his message, but it's sweet music to their ears. Their wretched and tortured souls can only find peace if President Obama's achievements can be attributed to usurpation and not legitimacy. A shark needs to swim, a racehorse needs to run and a bigot needs to hate. I'm not judging these people on anything superficial, but on the content of their character, which happens to be an unholy mess.
If the ugly dark cloud of this story has a silver lining it's that, while we still have a long we to go, we've also come a long way. Fifty years ago a black man making a serious run for president would more likely find himself in a round noose than an oval office. Today a man born of a black father and a white mother is the duly elected President of the United States. Yes, it's terrible that millions of Americans refuse to accept that basic truth and they'll do everything in their power to wish it away with shameful attempts to attack his legitimacy, but it seems that our 21st Century vile racists are less dangerous than their 20th Century counterparts. At this point, I'll take any victory, however small.
