Romney’s Son’s Birth Certificate Comment Causes National Firestorm

Editor's Note: The story is a restored version first published on Dec. 30, 2011, which was missing text and hyperlinks due to an upgraded website incarnation that wiped out some of the original content.

What was meant to be a light-hearted to a simple question about released tax returns during a quick meet-and-greet event at a Concord retirement community on Dec. 29, backfired into a national political story today.

Yesterday, a resident of asked Matt Romney, one of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's five sons, whether his father would release his tax returns, like virtually every other presidential candidate in modern history.

Matt Romney, with his other brothers concurring, said he didn’t know when or if the tax returns would be released. The candidate’s son then said, “I heard someone suggest the other day that as soon as President Obama releases his grades and birth certificate, and sort of a long list of things, then maybe he’d do it,” to a few giggles in the room. The eldest son, Tagg Romney, quickly jumped in: “That was not my dad saying that.”

The video, which was exclusively filmed by Concord NH Patch, went viral across the Internet after it was published this morning, as political reporters, activists, bloggers, and others started sharing the clip. A Google search revealed more than 2,000 “Matt Romney, birth certificate” web entries and hundreds of tweets on Twitter. The Huffington Post, a sister publication of Patch, also posted a version of the story (as of 8 p.m., the story featured more than 5,600 comments) and the video clip was featured on ABC World News Tonight, CNN’s “The Situation Room” program, and other television news programs.

A couple of hours after the story started to make headlines, Matt Romney posted a comment on his newly created Twitter account: “I repeated a dumb joke. My bad.”

Democrats, who have like a laser beam , quickly pounced on the comment.

In a fundraising email simply entitled, “Whoa,” Obama for America Campaign Manager Jim Messina urged the president's supporters to make a donation via a “cost of negativity” link.

“This is how the Romney campaign thinks it's going to win the Republican primary: by pandering to the dead-ender fringe of extremists who still question where the President was born,” he wrote.

Messina also added a link where supporters could buy Made in the USA mugs with the president's face and birth certificate printed on them.

Even a fellow Republican presidential candidate, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, piled on, saying at an event in Portsmouth, "The President was born in the United States – end of conversation,” adding that his tax returns were ”pretty much public.”