I wanted to make a few comments about the very bad run of polls Hillary Clinton has had over the last week. As I think regular readers know, I try to always remain a poll realist and resist partisan wishful thinking. Particularly I frequently shoot people down who have some explanation of why the latest bad poll isn’t really bad because something in the numbers is wrong. This is why I’ve repeatedly dismissed efforts to look at poll internals and show how they can’t be right because they don’t include enough of this or that group. Dems did that in 2004, Republicans did it in 2008 and 2012 and until about a week ago in 2016.
At the peak of birtherism, you may remember, an Army lieutenant colonel refused to deploy to Afghanistan absent proof that President Obama was born in the United States. The officer, a doctor named Terrence Lakin, was court-martialed, found guilty, jailed, and discharged from the Army.
One of Donald Trump’s introducers today at the new Trump Hotel, was a retired Air Force general who supported Lakin. He even submitted an affidavit on his behalf, questioning whether Obama was properly within the chain of command, since his U.S. birth was in question.
So there you have it: Trump brings a birther to his presser purporting to disavow birtherism.
Trump just said that he “finished” the birther controversy by forcing President Obama to release his birth certificate in 2011. But for literally years after the release of the long form birth certificate Trump continued to claim it was either a forgery or that it didn’t establish that President Obama was born in the United States
Here’s how CNN’s John Berman led off the top of the 11 o’clock hour (ET):
The advance word we’re getting is that in his remarks this morning, Trump will follow the lead of his press release yesterday and claim that Hillary Clinton invented and advanced birtherism even though this claim has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. It seems that Trump will seek to hang his hat on a confidential memo Clinton’s 2008 strategist Mark Penn wrote in which he said that Obama’s ‘exotic’ background was a liability not a strength. But Clinton never took up this advice, which is good because Penn is a notorious moron. (See my posts going back a decade on this point.) But more importantly, Penn never suggested Obama wasn’t born in the United States or wasn’t a US citizen. The fever swamp of Birtherism was already swamping at the time. Clinton had nothing to do with it. Even Trump had nothing to do with its origins, as far as I know. But he quickly became its greatest champion.
With Donald Trump it is literally hard to keep up with the lies. As of this morning he’s saying he’s going to have a “big announcement today” about birtherism and that he can’t say what it is because he needs to “keep the suspense going.” Yesterday he doubled-down on birtherism, disputing his own campaign manager’s claim that he now believes Barack Obama was born in the United States.
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Art inside the Trump/Pence HQ at Trump Tower in NYC pic.twitter.com/MSVIVOZgOU
— Ines de La Cuetara (@InesdLC) September 15, 2016
With the inclusion of this afternoon’s Fox Poll, the Polltracker Average is now exactly tied. Clinton 43.8%, Trump 43.8%.