December 24, 2010
Hawaii’s Governor Takes On ‘Birthers’
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
HONOLULU — Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who befriended President Obama’s parents when they were university students here, has been in office for less than three weeks. But he is so incensed over the “birthers” — conspiracy theorists who assert Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and challenge his right to be president — that he is already seeking ways to change Hawaiian law or regulation to allow him to release additional proof that the president was born in a hospital here in 1961.
“It’s an insult to his mother and to his father, and I knew his mother and father — they were my friends, and I have an emotional interest in that,” Gov. Abercrombie said in a telephone interview late Thursday night. “It’s an emotional insult, it is disrespectful to the president, it is disrespectful to the office.”
Mr. Abercrombie, who represented Honolulu in Congress until leaving Washington to run for governor, said he has initiated conversations with his attorney general and his health secretary about how he can make public more explicit documentation of Mr. Obama’s birth on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu. He said he has done so of his own accord, without any request from the president or the White House, which declined to comment.
“He’s a big boy, he can take sticks and stones, but there’s no reason on Earth to have the memory of his parents insulted by people whose motivation is solely political,” Mr. Abercrombie said. “Let’s put this particular canard to rest.”
Mr. Abercrombie, 72, was always regarded as something of an independent operator in Congress, a free spirit who embodies this state’s “aloha” tradition of inclusiveness and harmony. He returned a reporter’s phone call at 11:30 pm. Thursday — he had just gotten the message, he said, and he worried about deadlines — and spent 30 minutes chatting animatedly about Mr. Obama, Hawaii and his own election, saying that he had run “on the basis of our diversity defining us rather than dividing us.” It is much the same message that Mr. Obama used in 2008.
Now that he is in office, he is facing a huge state deficit. Mr. Obama himself referred to it during a news conference Wednesday in Washington when he spoke, somewhat imprecisely, about “schools that are laying off so many teachers that they start going to four days a week, as they’ve done in Hawaii, for example.” In fact, Hawaii instituted furloughs to avoid layoffs. Even so, the new governor said he is having the time of his life.
“If I was having a better time,” he said, laughing, ‘’I’d have to be arrested.”
But on the matter of the birthers, Mr. Abercrombie grew serious. “I’m going to take care of that,” he vowed, though he acknowledged what the White House and many journalists already know: the conspiracy theorists will be difficult to convince.
The birther movement began in 2008, as Mr. Obama was running for president, as critics began asserting, without proof, that he was born in Kenya, the birthplace of his father, Barack Obama Sr., who was an exchange student at the University of Hawaii here when he met and married Mr. Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. The Obama campaign ultimately responded by releasing a “certification of live birth,” an official document from the Hawaii Health Department and posting it on the Internet.
Two separate fact-checking organizations, FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, concluded the document was authentic. A reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser turned up two separate newspaper birth announcements, one in his own paper on Aug. 13, 1961 and another in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin the next day. Both said, “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, son, Aug. 4.”
Still, questions persist. The certificate number is blacked out on the Internet copy, and Mr. Obama’s detractors are also demanding release of his original long-form birth certificate, which is not a public record in Hawaii. The state government was so besieged by inquiries that earlier this year, Mr. Abercrombie’s predecessor, Linda Lingle, a Republican, signed a law allowing officials to treat them as nuisances and ignore them.
“I certainly hope by the fourth year of our administration that we’ll have dealt with this burgeoning birth controversy,” an exasperated-sounding White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters last year. The fact-checkers at PolitiFact sound similarly frustrated, noting in one post that they thought they had put the matter to rest. “Oh, how naïve we were,” the post’s author, Robert Farley, wrote.
Mr. Abercrombie said that while he did not see the Obamas at the hospital with their newborn son, he does remember the couple bringing baby Barack to social events. He said those who suggest Mr. Obama’s mother somehow slipped off to Kenya to give birth to him are engaging in a “demonological fantasy.” And he is furious over bills, introduced in various state legislatures, that would require presidential candidates to document that they were born in this country. Similar legislation died in Congress last year. Mr. Abercrombie takes it personally.
“My thought was, ‘Wait a minute, why didn’t you ask me, my friends in the national Congress, the House of Representatives,’ ” he said. “They know me, they know that I was here, but they didn’t even bother to have the courtesy to do that, which is disappointing to me, because it is very difficult for me not to conclude that bills like that are meant as a coded message that he is not really American.
“My thought is, ‘Rather than get into some kind of argument or play into that mentality, why not just simply try to authenticate this and let the facts speak for themselves?’ ”
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