I agree with you that all the attention paid to the birth certificate evades the uncontroversial fact that he is not the child of two American citizens. He is (possibly) native born, but not “natural born”.
He supposedly attended Columbia, which is where his mom’s boss was based... who is the father of the current secretary of the Treasury (Geithner). But, as you say, no one remembers him from school.
And then there is the episode of Lieutenant Quarles Harris, who got a peek at Obama’s passport records and a bullet in his head for it.
I was glad to get rid of the Clintons with their endless skullduggery and death lists and Chinese spooks and mystery money slopping around and rent-a-thugs intimidating the people who didn’t turn up dead. I thought, you know, that nice young man from Chicago has got to be an improvement over the Clinton mafia.
That is the very point the president, his codependents and enablers are desperately trying to evade. They are trying to "change the subject" by redefining what "natural-born citizen" means. They indicate the proper understanding is: any child born on U.S. soil regardless of the citizenship status of the child's parents. (Which strikes me as utterly mindless....)
Pretty durned "innovative," "progressive" right there!!!
But there is a precedent on this question — this is not the first time in U.S. presidential history that the topic of "natural born citizen" has come up, and been publicly ventilated at the time.
The first was President Chester A. Arthur. He had political enemies who tried to disqualify him from office on the grounds that, at the time of his birth, he was not born to two American-citizen parents.
Chester's mother was clearly an American citizen of multigenerational heritage. His father, however, was an Irishman — a British subject — who emigrated to America, married the aforesaid American, then a citizen of Vermont IIRC, and sired the future president Chester.
Twelve years later, Chester's Irish-born father became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
Notwithstanding, the argument at the time went: Since Chester A. Arthur at the time of his birth was not born of two American-citizen parents, he could not claim to be a "natural-born citizen of the United States," and was therefore utterly disqualified from holding the Office of POTUS.
Possibly the American public of the time did not see fit to visit on the son the penalty of his father's delayed naturalization. For Arthur served out his term, although he was not reelected.
The point is, if Obama's father is who Obama says he is, then Mr. Obama, Sr. never even naturalized as a U.S. citizen. He died a British subject.
Ergo, Obama would not be a natural-born citizen of the United States.
I didn't think public political norms and discourse could be more of a sewer than in the Clinton years either, dear marron. But my word, nobody could even imagine then just how much worse things could possibly get.
We are seeing it now. We are paying the penalty for our collective sloth....