Justa, your instincts are great but I disagree with you.
Even the President does not have the right to view Obama's birth certificate without a legal reason to do so. Can you imagine the outcry if the White House, FBI or CIA demanded that a Hawaiian government official (guaranteed to be a Democrat) produce his BC behind the scenes? The fact is, it HASN'T happened.
There are too many uneasy questions about this matter for me. His mother an airheaded white leftist, cavorting with a married black African and having a child with him. Remarrying an Indonesian and moving to Indonesia. Letting the stepfather enroll Obama in a madrassa using the Indonesian surname, and stating (this has been proven) that he was an Indonesian citizen. Rumors that Obama, while at Occidental college, claimed to be a foreign student and received financial aid reserved for foreign students -- he would've had to show evidence for this aid. Rumors that he traveled on an Indonesian passport while a young adult.
I can easily view his mother being PROUD that her son was not an American when she was a dumb young leftist, proud that his father and stepfather were non-white leftists from other countries, proud that he lived and was schooled in a non-Western school and country, proud that he had a non-American passport.
I can also view, from Obama's perspective, that he feels like a native-born American. He is not the lamebrain like his mother. Though a leftist, he believes he is a true-blue American. And in essence, he is. But that doesn't change the facts, if true, that he might not have been born in the USA, and that his parents might have deliberately changed his citizenship. All of which would make him Constitutionally ineligible, for life, to be President.
Thank you for your polite and thoughtful response. While it is true that there would be much screaming if someone had demanded the BC from officials behind the scenes, there are other ways. I am not prepared to state categorically that nobody has seen his birth certificate, and I really don't think that anybody here can do so with confidence.
With all of the questions that have been raised publicly, I simply find it incredible that some assurances have not been made by some means. If the intelligence officials and the Bush administration have been so stupid as to give national security secrets to an unqualified person and his staff, we have much larger problems than whether or not Obama is natural born. Our system of checks and balances will have already been compromised.