“The bastard angle is not a good one for Obama, because he has to come up with a good story as to why he’s deceived the American public about this angle.”
Obama can claim that until the INS records were released with the publication of the book “The Other Barack” he had no idea that his father was a bigamous sexual predator at the time he was born, and, as he said in the Ayers scripted “Dreams,” he relied on his mother's stories about his father and mother's “hopes for the future” and their “improbable love.” It is obvious to the whole world that somebody lied (Stanley Ann or Barry) and Stanley Ann is dead so why not blame her and claim innocence if you are Barry?
Bastards (children of unmarried women, whether or not their father is on the BC or not) are not stateless and never were in the US back to the beginning. They have the “unitary” citizenship of their mother when born in US jurisdiction. This is especially true after WWII when international treaties and laws were pretty much universally changed to prevent stateless births around the world, IIRC.
That's not entirely true. Marriages to foreign citizens have always complicated things. If there's not compelling evidence of a place of birth, then it creates problems and the Supreme Court has addressed this concept several times, such as here in 2008:
We explained the conundrum in Runnett v. Shultz: One obvious rational basis for a more lenient policy towards illegitimate children of U.S. citizen mothers is that illegitimate children are more likely to be "stateless" at birth. . . . As the government notes, if the U.S. citizen mother is not a dual national, and the illegitimate child is born in a country that does not recognize citizenship by jus soli (citizenship deter mined by place of birth) alone, the child can acquire no citizenship other than his mother's at birth.
As the founders would have viewed this issue, especially with the Treaty of 1783, the children of U.S. citizen women who married British subjects, they either became British or would have simply lost their U.S. citizenship. There's no natural principle to preserve U.S. citizenship as a default for an illegitimate child and/or an unmarried or abandoned mother. Thus, Obama can argue he's a bastard, but it's only going to make him a statutory citizen under 20th century law, but not a natural-born citizen.