Obama Natural Born?
by Joseph Morris
Issue 123 - January 7, 2009

I have been asked to comment on a recent on-line article whose thesis is that the reason that Barack Obama is filling his administration with a Clinton, sundry Clintonites, and other Democratic Party establishment retreads is as a form of "circling the wagons" because he is afraid that the natural-born-citizenship issue will blow up.

I think that Mr. Obama is afraid, but not of the prospect that he might be found constitutionally ineligible for the Presidency. He is the son of a mother who was a United States citizen at the time of his birth; I am aware of no evidence that, at any time after he attained his majority he renounced his American citizenship; so even if all of the various allegations regarding his Kenyan nativity or the falsification of his Hawaiian birth certificate or his adoption by an Indonesian father were true, nothing in that would trump the known facts that establish that he is a natural-born citizen.

Rather, he is out of his depth when it comes to the matters that a President of the United States must handle. Responsibility for war and peace, for prosperity or destitution, are matters far beyond any pay-grade he has ever held. His meteoric political career has been a marvelous fluke; he is utterly unprepared for high office; the questions now on his plate are not questions that have seriously commanded his attention before.

So he is afraid.

But there is a difference between being ill-informed and ill-prepared, which he is, and being stupid, which decidedly he is not. He knows his limits, and from that knowledge he gains power to protect himself. In addition, he seems to be well read in political history, when many others are not. Accordingly, he is following what seems to some to be a novel, but which is in fact a time-honored, path of sharing responsibility with the Brahmins within his own party. If there is failure, he has two lines of defense: (a) No one can accuse him of failing to appoint the “best and brightest” and the most experienced hands that his party has to offer. (b) He can fire them. If there is success, it will be his alone.

From the point of view of someone suddenly thrust into high office in times that are dangerous for the office-holder, his performance thus far has been nearly flawless.

Joseph Morris is senior partner at Morris and DeLaRossa in Chicago