President Barack Obama's appearance Wednesday in the White House briefing room to present a documented rebuttal of suspicions that he was not born on U.S. soil was more than just a surprise. It was a decisive new turn in the centuries-long American history of political accusation and innuendo.
By directly and coolly engaging a debate with his most fevered critics, Obama offered the most unmistakable validation ever to the idea that we are living in an era of public life with no referee — and no common understandings between fair and unfair, between relevant and trivial, or even between facts and fantasy.
Lurid conspiracy theories have followed presidents for as long as the office has existed. Yet even Obama's most recent predecessors benefited from a widespread consensus that some types of personal allegations had no place in public debate unless or until they received some imprimatur of legitimacy — from an official investigation, for instance, or from a detailed report by a major news organization.
"There are no more arbiters of truth," said former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. "So whatever you can prove factually, somebody else can find something else and point to it with enough ferocity to get people to believe it. We've crossed some Rubicon into the unknown."
It's hard to imagine Bill Clinton coming out to the White House briefing room to present evidence showing why people who thought he helped plot the murder of aide Vincent Foster— never mind official rulings of suicide — were wrong. George W. Bush, likewise, was never tempted to take to the Rose Garden to deny allegations from voices on the liberal fringe who believed that he knew about the Sept. 11 attacks ahead of time and chose to let them happen.
Obama did something like the equivalent of this, by releasing complete documentation from his Hawaii birth, then making a sober West Wing appearance to explain himself.
He did so, senior Obama advisers say, because of the radical reordering of the political-media universe over the past 15 years, or so. The decline of traditional media and the rise of viral emails and partisan Web and cable TV platforms has meant the near-collapse of common facts, believed across the political spectrum.
It did not matter that news organizations had debunked the notion that Obama was born overseas (which would have made him constitutionally ineligible for the presidency). Polls showed a startling percentage of Americans still either believed the myth or were unconvinced.
In response, Obama tried to ignore the issue, or tried to shame commentators who took it seriously. Or he tried to make fun of the whole fuss, by cueing up a rendition of Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" to mark his appearance at the Gridiron Dinner last month.
On Wednesday, he finally gave in and affirmed a new truth of politics in the Internet era: Nothing can be dismissed and anything that poses a political threat must be confronted directly.
"We're dealing with a lot of the same things Clinton and frankly Bush dealt with, but we're dealing with them at 1000 times the speed and with fewer referees," said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. "That is the downside of the disaggregation of the media. If you don't want to believe what someone is telling you, you can go somewhere else. If you believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that the president is not American, you can go somewhere to find somebody to validate that."
Another top Obama adviser singled out some of the forces behind the new rules.
"Clinton never had to deal with a fully formed Internet," the adviser said. "Drudge's power was born out of the revelations of 1998. A fully automated cable TV universe with the Internet is something that he never had to deal with."
Joe Lockhart, who was Clinton's White House press secretary, said: "You've lost the ability to starve a story to death. So what you have to do is raise the price of those who are making the charges. If Donald Trump is out there saying this, you've got to make him pay a price for throwing a bomb before too much collateral damage is done."
The days of not elevating an opponent or refraining from punching down are gone.
"You literally can't laugh anything off," Lockhart said. "There's nothing neutral in politics. It's either helping you or hurting you. You've got to make sure it's helping you or you're going to lose."
Lockhart's observation hinted at one reality of modern politicians in this anything-goes environment. Much as they bemoan the "freak show" for inserting once-fringe players a central role in the debate, most successful national figures also use this phenomenon to their advantage.
Republican operatives in Washington, for instance, commonly roll their eyes or groan in discomfort at the most florid rhetoric of conservative commentators like Glenn Beck, fearing it paints the party broadly as less than serious or responsible. But they relish the way Beck and ideological confederates excite the GOP base, a contributing factor in the party's strong performance in 2010. Democratic professionals, meanwhile, may not have publicly embraced the controversy over alleged gaps in George W. Bush's Vietnam-era service in the National Guard, but they enjoyed it when liberal commentators waved that flag.
Obama, likewise, regularly calls upon both parties to lower their voices and work more constructively with one another. The reality, though, is his team enjoys giving the stage to the GOP's most divisive voices. Early in Obama's term, Gibbs and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel took to calling Rush Limbaugh the de facto leader of the Republican Party.
In what may explain why Obama himself took to the cameras, Pfeiffer noted that pushing back against fringe voices can be more difficult within the confines of the presidency.
"In campaigns, you have more tools to combat viral rumors," he said. "You've got thousands of volunteers, you've got paid media. But in government, it's more challenging."
So, Gibbs noted, the president has to consider taking steps he never would have in the past and appearing on shows like Oprah and David Letterman and networks like ESPN.
"It's hard to see a president doing those things 10 or 20 years ago, but it's become almost a requirement now," he said.
The difficulty, Gibbs continued, is knowing where to draw the line. Will the president, for example, now release his college transcripts because Trump is suggesting he benefited from affirmative action?
"Does it become incumbent to prove everything wrong?" he asked. "You have to be very careful to not fall into that trap because you'll spend all of your time and energy chasing your own tail."
Pfeiffer said that the release of the long-form certificate will help settle the issue among those Americans who are open-minded about the issue.
"There will be some segment of the population who will believe what they're going to believe, regardless of anything else," he said. "But for the majority of the country, we have the capacity to correct the record and convince people of the truth. It's not as easy as it used to be, but it's possible."
"It may be easier under some theory for us to get reelected now, but [the issue] has made it harder to get things done," Pfeiffer said. "Instead of debating issues, a huge chunk of time and energy was being used to talk about the president's birth certificate."
As Obama alluded to in his remarks Wednesday, the White House recognized that the attention paid to the president's citizenship was taking its toll on their ability to communicate.
Republicans, however, suspect that Obama had been riding a tiger that was showing signs of getting hungry.
"The president himself has hoped Republicans would continue to talk about it, thereby damaging their own credibility," said Republican strategist Karl Rove. "It was a useful diversion.
"But take a look at recent polls," Rove added. "The problem was the view was taking hold among independents. He got worried it was about to spin out of control."
The Republican suggested it was cynical of Obama to wait until now to disclose the long-form.
"He had the ability to release it last year and end the issue, but he wanted to play rope-a-dope with Republicans," Rove said.
Pfeiffer denied any gamesmanship.
"Up until a month ago, nobody really asked for the long-form," he said. "It was fringe. It was a settled issue for 99 percent of the country."
Rove also said that while most mainstream Republicans have distanced themselves from birtherism, some Democrats didn't do the same about whether Bush knew about Sept. 11.
"Our situation was different than this because you had guys like Howard Dean saying that was 'an interesting theory,'" the Republican recalled.
Other Republicans acknowledge the difficulty of communicating a message at a time when the line between fact and fiction is blurred.
"It's a terrible problem for the body politic," said former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer. "People like me who have been or are in the arena have an obligation to speak out against people in both parties who push untruths."
But Fleischer noted that just because politicians now have a harder time getting through via a fractured news media to a public that's susceptible to believe conspiracy theories, that doesn't mean it's always bad for the candidate on the receiving end.
"The political discourse is much worse now, but that's not always to the detriment of the so-called victim," he said. "In this case, President Obama came out looking better."
Lockhart agreed, recalling some of the conservatives who tormented his boss.
"Look at the rogue's gallery of Clinton accusers," he said. "Most of them blew themselves up."
And Lockhart noted that even now, the most hardcore of the birthers still won't be satisfied.
"They'll probably ask for the first diaper," he said. "They'll want to see the DNA."
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