President Obama – Making a post-DNC stop at a Florida sports bar and grill, President Barack Obama made a rare joking reference to the controversy over his birth certificate while talking to a boy from Hawaii. Approaching a table full of children at the Gator’s Dockside, Obama smiled when 6-year-old Andre Wupperman said he was from Hawaii. “Do you have a birth certificate?” Obama asked of the young blond haired boy.
Obama has long been the target of the “birther movement,” a group that has gone so far as to call for the commander-in-chief’s impeachment on the basis that he was not born in America. Just last year, the president released a long-form version of his birth certificate to silence conspiracy theorists, a measure that even today, seems to have gone ignored by the strictest of none believers. Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961 to Barack Obama Sr. of Kenya and Ann Dunham of Kansas.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, then candidate Obama had released a Certificate of Live Birth to disprove those who had believed that he had been born in his father’s native Kenya. Though “birther” theories failed to keep Obama from taking office that year, some GOP party members continue to make reference to Obama’s place of birth.
“No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate,” Mitt Romney said during a campaign rally last month in Michigan. Though the Republican presidential nominee said that the comment was meant as a joke, Obama’s campaign heavily criticized Romney for re-invoking birther rhetoric that has proven false.
Still, Obama’s weekend appearance in Florida showed that the president can still make light of a political issue that has long since gone stale.
