Campaign Diaries

In the two weeks since my post on the Birther bill’s gaining new champions in the House, this ridiculous movement has gained even more cheerleaders. News stories now regularly allude to the issue and cable TV, unable to pass up on the opportunity to invite Allen Keyes or to score links from Drudge and Huffington, is discussing it at length.

At least one media personality has been converted: Lou Dobbs, the immigration-obsessed CNN host. Yesterday, he insisted that Obama had not produced a birth certificate (the truth: the president has submitted to the standard procedure of releasing an official copy) and went as far as to proclaim that he has “no idea what the reality is here,” says Dobbs. “You suppose he’s undoc — no, I wouldn’t use the word ‘undocumented,’ wouldn’t be right.”

We know how obsessed Dobbs is with immigration, but that last sentence (the conflation of all his paranoid fears) makes him look like his own caricature. “This isn’t one of those things that goes away quite as easily as I’d thought,” he concluded. Obviously not, Lou: if you harped about it enough in your primetime CNN show, you could make Caesar’s assassination a timely controversy.

All of this obviously has the potential of hurting conservative opposition to Obama. As the 1990s showed, obsessive hatred does not yield a party that many political benefits, quite the contrary - it can lead to unexpected defeats in seemingly unlosable elections (see the 1998 midterms). Democrats will have a field day attacking vulnerable Republicans who are on record as supporting the Birther movement as extremists (for instance Rep. John Campbell, a co-sponsor of H.R. 1503) and portray the GOP as beholden to its fringe.

But for many Republicans, the Birther movement could be a big political opportunity: It allows them to position themselves as moderates without having to substantially move to the center. Case in point, the much-discussed video of Delaware Rep. Mike Castle being interrogated by an angry woman screaming about Obama’s Kenyan birth and demanding that Castle help her take the country back. “If you’re referring to the president, then he is a citizen of the United States,” Castle answered. The crowd booed. “You can boo, but he is a citizen of the United States.” he continued.

Think about it for a minute: Just by uttering the banal fact that the U.S. president is a U.S. citizen, Castle sparked a wave of stories describing his confrontation with the GOP’s fringe - stories that make him look sane, moderate and willing to take on conservatives, just the type of coverage he needs to win in blue-leaning Delaware.

And he was able to achieve this feat without supporting the stimulus or offering any type of encouragement for health care reform.

Other Republicans are not interested in affirming the president’s citizenship, however. H.R. 1503, which makes a congressional issue out of the fears of the Birther movement, had already gained 7 backers by early July: Its main sponsor, Bill Posey, and 6 co-sponsors (Goodlatte, Blackburn, Campbell, Carter, Culberson, Neugebauer). Since then, three new conservative congressmen have added themselves to the list of co-sponsors: Dan Burton (IN-05), Kenny Marchant (TX-24) and Ted Poe (TX-02).

That means that 10 Republicans - 5 of them from Texas - are now sponsoring or co-sponsoring the Birther bill.

As you can see on the table below, none of the 3 new co-sponsors are vulnerable. If anything, Burton has far more to fear from a Republican primary than from the general election (he has already drawn several challengers in 2010) so this co-sponsorship could help him. But Marchant is not completely safe either. Not only did he score an unconvincing victory last fall, but his Dallas-suburbs district is rapidly trending blue: Gore lost by 36%, Kerry by 30% and Obama by 11%.

Interestingly, Burton and Marchandt’s addition to the list means that a majority half of the Birther bill’s sponsors are now also co-sponsors of Michele Bachmann’s paranoid foreign currency-banning constitutional amendment; the other 3 are Posey, Blackburn and Culberson. [Update, with tips to Chris Steller for correcting me: It's 5 out of 10, so half rather than an outright majority.] We are here talking about the congressmen who are closest to movement conservatives.

In particular, Burton became famous in the 1990s for channeling most of the Clinton conspiracy theories - starting with his conviction that Vince Foster had been murdered and that the first couple was involved. Burton went as far as calling the press in his backyard to reenact the crime by shooting into a melon.

As the chairman of the Government Oversight and Reform Committee, Burton masterminded congressional investigations into Bill Clinton’s funding the 1996 campaign but Burton’s own ethical issues and strikingly vehement style made him a bigger lightning rod than the president. Burton attracted so much criticism that he was chided by Newt Gingrich himself (then Speaker, Gingrich called the Burton hearings “a circus”) and he had to apologize to the GOP.

As for Poe, he might not have partnered with Bachmann on the currency issue but he found other common ground. Just a week after signing on to the Birther bill, Posey signed on Bachmann’s new priority: Restricting the amount of information citizens are required to provide the U.S. census. (Despite the fact that Bachmann once called for a thorough expose of her fellow congressmen’s “un-American” activities, she is worried about the “ultimate protection of our sensitive personal information.”)