I could easily take the attitude "I don't care what the media and those gutless moderates and independents think of me", but I'm not running for office and so it doesn't affect me.
On the other hand if I'm Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, or Tim Pawlenty and I need these independent and moderate swing voters and decent media coverage to win the Presidential election in 2012, then it matters very much what these voters and the media think of me, to a point, because if they think I'm a far out conspiracy believer with no serious agenda to move this country away from Obama and his disastrous policies I'll lose and Obama will have four more years to wreck this country.
Now I'm not saying we sell out our principals and bow to the media like John McCain and Lindsey Graham unfortunately enjoy doing, because like it or not the media will never like or be the friend of conservatives. What we do need to do though is present a clear common sense conservative agenda to the voters the way Reagan did because that's how we win elections and advance the conservative movement.
It's not that any of us think the possibly constitutionally noncompliant circumstances of this POTUS' birth are irrelevant any more than the 'Birthers' here do.
But we often like to commiserate with each other around here that we are in a distinct minority ideologically with respect to to the rest of the country, and the cold hard reality of the facts on the ground is that many of the rank & file American people at large whose support Barack Obama needs to win in order to facilitate his usurpation of complete control over the US economy & fulfill his ambition to destroy her powerful place in the world don't see it the way rank & file Freepers do at all.
Other Americans know perfectly well that the Constitution specifies that only "natural born citizens" may accede to the office of the Presidency. But for them, merely the undisputed fact that his mother was born an American citizen on American soil suffices to deem him qualified, period, and they see all this proccupation with the arcane minutiae of the circumstances of his birth & the missing official documentation thereof as absurdly irrelevant legal mumbo-jumbo.
Further - and this is what should concern us now - they view all the people who are currently raising the birth issue as merely sore losers seeking to discredit this President, not on the relative merits of the policies he espouses & is currently rushing to implement, but on what to them is a contrived distraction based on a silly technicality.
That's not correct, his constitutional eligibility isn't a silly or irrelevant technicality at all, of course, but that is the reality of public perception, like it or not, and anybody who naively believes that PR is an unworthy consideration in devising a way to successfully counter this President's agenda with the general public is living in a fantasy world as clueless as any singles-scene loser who thinks he can get by with never bathing nor brushing his teeth & still get dates with beautiful women. Our political image - and the public's perception of our opposing agenda - is vitally important in fighting for the future of this republic, no matter what anybody else around here says.
Watching Republicans & others make such a relatively massive fuss over this birth issue (gleefully egged on by this administration, its toadying shills in the press & loyal hoaxers in the lefty blogosphere), a huge swath of the voting public is being encouraged to conclude that this President's ideological opposition, having been proven incapable of winning the last election, is now incapable of mounting an effective rational defense against his policies of governance on their own merits, so conservatives are therefore now reduced to desperately seeking to have him thrown out on what (to others, at least) is an utterly irrelevant hyper-technical criterion concoted by green eyeshade-wearing hyper-paranoiac consitutionalists. That's emphatically NOT true, but that is indeed how it is playing in Peoria at the moment. Check out his rebounding Rasmussen index ever since the issue was cynically ramped up again in the Obamedia to rescue his numbers.
And because it's playing so well in his favor at the moment is precisely why this President will continue to evade addressing the issue directly by simply declining to cough up his BC forthwith & that's exactly why his BFF's in the media are only too happy to highlight some conservatives' concerns about his consitutional illegitimacy and that's why hoaxers in the lefty blogosphere are going to such great lengths to try to ensnare gullible birthers with phony BC's: because it makes all conservatives look like they are devoid of a legitimate program for governance themselves and are incapable of devising an attractive, coherent alternative to this POTUS's ideological agenda.
In other words, the President & his Alinkyite strategists can discredit all conservative opposition to all of his entire political program as desperate, kneejerking hyperpartisan naysayers trying to disqualify this POTUS through the fine print because they can't do it with fine ideas and the Alinsky-Soros Party can proceed to institute its destructive agenda for this country unabated and unimpeded.
But alas, like moths to the flame, we're voluntarily aiding & abetting Barack Obama & his crooked cronies to do just that, it would seem. :-(