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Opinion: Perry doesn’t know whether Obama’s birth certificate is real

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First John Boehner, now Rick Perry.

In February the speaker of the House said he was willing to accept that President Obama was a U.S. citizen but added that ‘the American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can’t -- it’s not my job to tell them.’ He also said he would take Obama ‘at his word’ that he was a Christian -- implying that Obama was the only authority for that proposition. Overall, Boehner’s comments managed to encourage ‘birthers’ even even as they seemed to accept that Obama was a native-born Christian.

Flash forward to the 2012 presidential campaign. In an interview with Parade magazine. Gov. Rick Perry engaged in Boehner-like equivocation about whether Obama’s birth certificate is real. ‘I don’t know, ‘ Perry said. ‘I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night .... He doesn’t think it’s real .... I don’t have any idea. It doesn’t matter. [Obama is] the president of the United States. He’s elected. It’s a distractive issue.’

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Like Boehner, Perry was accepting Obama’s citizenship while raising doubts about it. If he really thought it was a ‘distractive’ issue, he would have said: ‘I believe the president is an American citizen. End of story.’ That he provided a quibbling answer instead suggests that he may think there’s still a ‘birther’ constituency out there -- a depressing thought.

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Obama closes one ‘birther’ chapter. Will another open?

-- Michael McGough

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