A similar instinct drove Obama’s decision last week to confront the speculation, aides said.
“The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer wrote in a blog post on the White House Web site. “It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country.”
Obama told donors in New York on Wednesday night: “Part of what happened this morning was me trying to remind the press and trying to remind both parties that what we do in politics is not a reality show. It’s serious.”
On Friday, Obama signed a letter to Hawaii officials requesting the document, which they replied could be made available Monday. Obama dispatched his outside counsel, Judy Corley, to Hawaii to retrieve it, and she delivered it to the White House on Tuesday night.
The timing for Obama’s appearance was in some ways surprising. It came on a day when the top story might otherwise have been news of changes in the administration’s national security team. White House officials said they wanted to release the paperwork as quickly as possible after receiving it, to preempt any further conspiracies about whether it was doctored. They were also aiming for an element of surprise, catching off-guard a White House press corps that never had any hint that the administration might make this move.
The president told reporters that he wanted the nation to return to serious business; hours later, he left the White House to travel to Chicago, where he taped an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and then to New York for three fundraisers.
Obama’s announcement came just as Trump was arriving in New Hampshire on what was billed as a prelude to a possible run for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.
Trump has vaulted in some opinion polls regarding the Republican 2012 field, in part by questioning Obama’s birthplace, but a series of major Republican figures, including former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a likely contender for the GOP nomination, and Karl Rove, the top political strategist for President George W. Bush, have publicly urged members of the party to move on from the “birther” issue.
Indeed, the controversy carries some measure of political opportunity for Obama. The president has been mentioning the birthers during recent campaign speeches, attempting to fire up his supporters by reminding them of the opposition the president faces.
It “creates, I think, a problem for them when they want to actually run in a general election where most people feel pretty confident the president was born where he says he was, in Hawaii,” Obama said in the ABC News interview. “He doesn’t have horns. We may disagree with him on some issues, and we may wish that, you know, the unemployment rate was coming down faster, and we want to know his plan on gas prices.
“But we’re not really worrying about conspiracy theories or birth certificates,” Obama said, “and so I think it presents a problem for them.”
Staff writer Perry Bacon Jr. and polling manager Peyton M. Craighill contributed to this report.
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