NH Pol: I Created the Obama Birther Movement

MANCHESTER, NH — Andy Martin, a former presidential and congressional candidate who was first to challenge President Barack Obama’s life story back in 2004, said this morning that the rebirth of the “Birther” issue by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and her supporters in the mainstream media will backfire on the candidate and only end up helping Republican Donald Trump. Efforts by Clinton “and her media sycophants to revive and reopen the issue are going to backfire,” he said in an email to the press on Saturday.

“She is trying to attract ‘swing’ voters," he said. "Will they really be impressed by a lecture from Charlie Rangel and other members of the CBC on the dead issue of Obama’s birth certificate? Very doubtful.”

Martin, who previously lived in Illinois and attempted to run for U.S. Senate there in 2004 against Obama (and ran for Senate here in 2014), has laid claim to have created "the Birther movement" – people who don’t believe that Obama was born in America. He said he first came to know the president when he was in the state Senate in Illinois. He believed that the president had made “misrepresentations … about his family history” in “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” first published in the mid-1990s and later, republished in 2004, as Obama began to ramp up a U.S. Senate campaign, and began working on his own book. Martin’s book, “Obama: The Man Behind the Mask,” and posts on his website, led to speculation about the birth certificate and he sued to have it released, he said.

“Obama had issued a computerized record, a certificate of live birth, but not the original document,” Martin noted. “I sued in Hawai’i to release the original document and the Birther movement was born out of my litigation and Internet columns. I always maintained Obama was born in Hawai’i. Later, crazies took over the movement and proposed increasingly irrational and unfounded claims Obama was born in Kenya. I never supported those claims in any way.”

Martin said he walked away and disassociated himself with Birtherism and added that Donald Trump, “was a late arrival” to the speculation.

“He never sent anyone to Hawai’i and no doubt just took my own original research and used it himself,” Martin stated. “I have asked Trump to release his records and he never has.”

While Clinton is critical of Trump embracing birtherism in 2011, the issue appears to have first been floated by campaign aides and supporters of Clinton in 2008, as reported by McClatchy last night. The org sent a reporter to Kenya to investigate the matter after a meeting with Clinton confidante Sydney Blumenthal urged them to investigate the place of Obama’s birth. Blumenthal now denies the claim, according to the report.

Birtherism began to take hold in the non-politerati public consciousness after Obama became the Democrat’s presidential nominee and as more and more Republicans believed that he was not a citizen. The issue subsided but reached a fever pitch in 2011 during the 2012 Republican presidential primaries as rank-and-file GOP activists, presidential candidates, and Trump, who was flirting with a run, speculated about the issue.

When Mitt Romney’s son, Matt Romney, cracked a joke about some friends suggesting that his dad should only release his tax returns when the president released his birth certificate in Concord in late December 2011, it made national headlines. The president later released a copy of his long-form birth certificate and the issue was “as dead-as-a-door-nail,” according to Martin – until now.

“Clinton operatives decided they could use the issue to agitate their ‘base’ … but using Obama's birth certificate is a desperate and counterproductive maneuver,” he stated. “Voters know Obama is not on the ballot. People are going to be turned off by the Clinton/CBC actions. The ‘base’ Clinton is trying to agitate is not the base they are losing. So instead of benefiting Clinton, the latest effort to exploit Birtherism is almost certainly going to boomerang on Clinton and the CBC with independent voters and millennials.”

Martin said that Trump dealt with the matter as best he could on Friday and this will be the end of the story.

He added that the president created speculation about his origins when he would “constantly drop hints that Kenya was ‘home’ …" adding that he "never disavowed claims by Kenyan politicians that he had been born there. They falsely claimed that a ‘granny’ was his grandmother, even though she was senile and claims to have been present at Obama’s birth, which was obviously delusional.” Martin likened it to “catnip to irritate and frustrate the right" and alleged that the president "is the real ‘founder’ of doubts about his origins.”

Martin added, “For myself, he never fooled me. I always believed Obama was 100 percent American born, even though his emotional and psychological loyalties may lie elsewhere.”