I really don't know who started it (I've heard the tale about the publicist and the book note), but you may be right that Obama actually worked to sustain it. I do think that his campaigns used it to tag his opponents as screwier than they really were.
A lot of us opposed Obama on substantive grounds (issues), but in order to be credible at all we often had to first overcome the suspicion that we were whacked-out birthers who couldn't accept the simple and obvious realities of his very birth. If we couldn't accept the validity of state records and contemporary newspapers, what point would there be in even discussing anything with us? Yes, I think that Obama benefited from the aura of delusion and paranoia that surrounded the entire birther movement.
So, you're right, it is entirely possible that the Obama campaigns gave quiet aid and comfort to the birther movement.
I think we can all quit referring to the question of who were his parents as the birther movement. It's a derogatory term designed to diminish the obvious question:
Who is this man; where was he born and who were his parents. What was it about his true parentage that had to be hidden? And don't say Frank Marshall Davis is his father. Frank had an attractive wife and a number of children and lived 'on the windward side of the island' Frank commuted to the office of the paper in Honolulu he wrote for on a daily basis. Frank did move closer into Honolulu later, but still a considerable distance from the so called birth announcement address, which the Dunhams apparently shared with Stanley Armour's employer, the Pratt family, for a short period.
That friendship is a fabrication which reminds me of the so-called friendship between Tom Mboya and the Kenyan student, when Tom Mboya was at Oxford, the Kenyan student had not long left the Anglican High School at Maseno, a boarding school. What on earth might they have had in common? A seasoned politician and a callow youth who was expelled for cooking chickens in his dorm room?
So just as it is unlikely Tom Mboya knew the Kenyan student, it's very doubtful he and Stanley Armour Dunham knew each other. That Dunham/Davis friendship has no basis.
It's the Davis background in Chicago and his associates that need to be looked at. His activities in the Organisation for the Protection of the Foreign Born in Hawaii that point to a possible involvement in the tampering with birth certificate lodgements and birth birth notices.
And Stanley Ann Dunham first shows up in Hawaii after a name change in 1963 with a toddler.
Go back to Start. Who was he before he became who we are to believe he is...
Birther... means nothing. Where he was born is meaningless if you don't know who he is.