Obama Certificate: Lose-Lose for Obama [Fritzworth]

[Oops! Didn't mean to step on Ace's post on the same subject -- open up to see my take on the matter.]

Obama has just handed the Republican Party an enormous gift in releasing his long-form birth certificate (or, as Obama curiously put it, "additional information"). Why does this help the GOP? Three reasons, at least:

1) It deflates (and may even kill off) the Trump candidacy. I see this as a great help to the GOP; your mileage may vary.

2) It provides every other GOP presidential candidate coverage on the birth issue ("Hey, he released his birth certificate. That's good enough for me."). For that matter, it should help relegate birthers to a much smaller corner of the GOP big tent.

3) It shows the internal stress that Obama and his camp are feeling.

Let's talk about that last item. Obama could have done this months or years ago, but didn't. More importantly, he could have held off for months more -- particularly until the GOP campaign was far more advanced, with various candidates committed (or not) to the birther issue -- and then released it to make birther-sympathetic (or even -agnostic) candidates look like fools. But he released it now. Why?

Well, it's hard not to believe that Drudge's headline of yesterday ("Only 38% of Americans certain Obama born here", or words to that effect) was a motivation. Likewise, it's hard to believe that the pending release (in three weeks) of "Where's the Birth Certificate?" by Jerome Corsi (currently #28 overall in books on Amazon) isn't a factor as well.

I think that Obama and his campaign managers are very worried. Poll numbers are dropping. Late night comics have started to turn on Obama. Even the New York Times noted that the QE2 flooding provided little stimulus but has fueled inflation. And...only 38% of Americans are sure Obama was born here.

In the game of Go, there is a concept called sente. If you have sente, it means that your opponent is forced to respond directly to each of your moves rather than carry out his own strategy. This release by Obama suggests the Republicans have sente right now. Obama has been trying to maintain (or regain) sente himself by attacking Ryan Paul Ryan and other fiscal realists as "extremists", but I think he's losing even that effort.

If the Republicans have the wit and cojones to see and exploit it (a questionable proposition), they have a tremendous opportunity here to maintain that advantage by pressing Obama hard on a specific issue, forcing him to respond to that issue, and then moving on to an entirely different issue. If they do that wisely (again...), the end result is that all those different points will combine into a strongly defended core area, with Obama trying to chip away along the perimeter.

But we'll see. ..fritz..

posted by Open Blogger at 10:55 AM

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