Many of the same news organizations and research groups today dismissing concerns about Barack Obama's constitutional eligibility were far more eager to cover the issue when Republican presidential candidate John McCain was the subject.
An archive search shows the question of McCain's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president was actively pursued by Democratic Party activists and the mainstream media in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, despite the ridicule now heaped upon those questioning Obama's qualifications under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.
In an article published Feb. 28, 2008, months before McCain was nominated for president by the Republican Party, FactCheck.org, at the very center of Obama's defense against eligibility questions, was itself raising them about McCain.
In a piece that led off with the question, "How can Panamanian-born McCain be elected president?" FactCheck.org conceded McCain did meet the natural-born citizen requirements. But the website qualified its answer, stating that if McCain did win the presidency, the issue could be challenged in court.
After the Republican and Democratic conventions, on, FactCheck.org weighed into the Obama eligibility debate Aug. 21, 2008," claiming its "staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate." The certificate in question, however, was a short-form Certificate of Live Birth, or COLB, not a hospital-generated long-form birth certificate listing the hospital where Obama was born as well as other relevant birth information, including the name of the attending physician.
Almost coincident with the FactCheck.org article, a flurry of mainstream media news pieces popped up about McCain's eligibility to be president.
On Feb. 28, 2008, Carl Hulse wrote a New York Times article, "McCain's Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out."
"To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states," Hulse wrote.
Picking up on the Times piece, MSNBC.com ran a feature on the same day posing the question, "Born in the USA?"
The Wall Street Journal the same day published a Law Blog column asking: "Does John McCain Have a Birthplace Problem?"
CBS News speculated McCain's eligibility question "could conceivably end up in before the Supreme Court," adding the comment, "And you thought counting chads was a circus."
The next day, the Times of London published a similar piece, "McCain's Panama birth prompts eligibility probe by his campaign."
NBC correspondent Pete Williams also published a piece Feb. 29, 2008, on the MSNBC website, "McCain's citizenship called into question."
"Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his advisers are doing their best to brush aside questions – raised in the liberal blogosphere – about whether he is qualified under the Constitution to be president," Williams wrote. "But many legal scholars and government lawyers say it's a serious question with no clear answer."
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3 comments:
If this was a REAL issue, you would not have seen this man sitting in the Presidential chair for over a year.
These people have had plenty of time to deal with this issue and they haven't done anything about it because they cannot prove he was not US born!
Instead of spending all your time, or should I say wasting it, do things that will HELP this COUNTRY!
These people are idiots!
McCain had a birthplace problem. Obama did not have a birthplace problem. That is the difference.
Obama was born in Hawaii, as his official birth certificate from Hawaii shows. And the facts on the birth certificate--that he was born in Hawaii in 1961--were confirmed twice by the officials in Hawaii.
In my opinion this is what the small portions of the republican party of "birthers, baggers and blowhards" have brought you. They are good at "Follow the Leader" of their dullard leaders, they listen to Beck, Hedgecock, Hannity, O'Reilly, Rush and Savage and the rest of the Blowhards. Are you surprise at what they do when you know what they think? The world is complicated and most republicans (Hamiliton, Lincoln, Roosevelt) believe that we should use government a little to increase social mobility, now its about dancing around the claim of government is the problem. The sainted Reagan passed the biggest tax increase in American history and as a result federal employment increased, but facts are lost when mired in mysticism and superstition. Although most republicans are trying to distant themselves from this fringe they have a long way to go.
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