For more than two years, President Barack Obama was hounded by a whisper campaign that he wasn't actually born in the United States.
That whisper got stronger as conspiracy theorists nicknamed "birthers" claimed Obama was actually born in Kenya, despite all the evidence that he was born in Hawaii.
Obama made a common-sense decision not to waste time and energy on a silly rumor. The birthers got tangled in knots, contradicting each other and grasping at supposed evidence that included a birth certificate that was supposed to be from Kenya that was clearly an amateur forgery.
It's hard to combat rumors and whisper campaigns like this. Obama did everything right by not treating the issue as if it were a real controversy. Running ads during the campaign would have seemed defensive and weak. Letting the press squash the birther rumors was the right approach.
And the mainstream media did it's job of fact-checking, running investigation after investigation that all came back with the same easy conclusion: Obama was born in Hawaii.
This press strategy worked until the Republican presidential campaign started gearing up in 2011 and FOX News, which had largely ignored the birther story, started running piece after piece about it.
Birtherism went a bit mainstream when Republican presidential hopefuls like Sarah Palin realized they could score points with the right-wing base by hinting at the birther issue.
Despite all the evidence that Obama was clearly born in Hawaii, roughly 25 percent of Americans, and 45 percent of Republicans, said they believed Obama was born in another country, according to a poll by The New York Times and CBS News.
Real estate developer Donald Trump didn't hint at birtherism, or flirt with it. When he started talking about running for president, he gave birtherism a huge bear hug. Combined with his national name identification, his birther position resonated with the hard-core Republicans who vote in primaries and caucuses and vaulted him to the top of the polls.
Now, there are three kinds of debates:
- debates about the past, about facts and blame
- debates about the present, dealing in values and opinions
- debates about the future, weighing costs versus benefits
Where exactly Obama was born is a debate about the past, about facts. There's no gray area. It's black or white.
Trump and the birthers did put pressure on Obama, with the rising number of voters telling pollsters they had doubts about whether Obama was born in America.
But the birthers also painted themselves in a corner by going all-in with the birth certificate claims. Obama had released the official certificate of live birth, a legal document. Birthers kept demanding his full, long-form birth certificate, which is not typically released.
The longer the controversy went on, the more Republican presidential hopefuls like Palin and Trump felt free to pile on with additional whispers. If this long-form birth certificate does exist, why doesn't Obama release it? Birthers touted a statement by a low-level clerk in Hawaii claiming the long-form certificate didn't exist.
They speculated that maybe there was something on the form Obama didn't want anyone to see -- maybe his religion was listed as "Muslim."
The same day s Trump landing in New Hampshire, one of the key early states for the Republican race, Obama put a stake through the heart of birthers.
His personal attorney flew to Hawaii and got copies of his long-form birth certificate.
Then, instead of simply posting it on his website, he talked about it at a press conference, saying, "We do not have time for this kind of silliness."
Obama said that America, and the world, had other important things to do.
The president made Trump and the birthers -- who had banked on Obama never producing the long-form birth certificate -- look quite silly.