Let’s say that you’re Stanley Dunham, a middle-aged man living in Hawaii in 1961, and your only daughter marries the already married Kenyan man that impregnated her. She then travels to Kenya with him, and although she tries to return because his family did not treat her well (because they do not approve of his marriage to a white girl), the airline won’t let her fly back to Hawaii because she’s too far along in the pregnancy to fly. (The preceding sentence is based on the accounts of Obama’s relatives in Kenya.) So little Barack is born in Kenya, as recounted by his Kenyan step-grandmother (the one that he put in front of the cameras and called “Granny”).
Your’re back in Hawaii, and your daughter calls you long-distance and tells you the date of the baby’s birth. You’re not an immigration lawyer, but you fear that, because your daughter’s husband is not an American, that her baby won’t be a U.S. citizen if the government finds out that he wasn’t born in the U.S. (and, given that your daughter was only 18, and thus had not lived in the U.S. for at least 5 years after she turned 14, you would be have been right so to fear). so, what do you do? You call the newspaper and report the birth of Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. in Honolulu. And when your daughter returns to Hawaii, you tell her to go down to the baby registry and register young Barack as having been born in Honolulu. It’s not that you are arrogant enough to believe that your grandson has a good chance of some day becoming president if only he could be a natural-born citizen, it’s that if the government finds out that your grandson was born abroad he won’t be a U.S. citizen at all (unless he takes a citizenship test at 18). So you protect your grandchild from the damage done by his irresponsible parents and concoct the story that he was born in Honolulu.
Now, that does not sound to me as at all far-fetched, and it certainly isn’t the case of a conspiracy theory for the election of Obama as president that began in 1961. It’s a perfectly reasonable story, and one that is a true one if we believe Obama’s Kenyan step-grandmother. Now, if this is true, the question is, when did Obama find out that he was born in Kenya? Because that is when the conspiracy actually began.
