So, Barack Obama released his “long form” birth certificate and bought himself some temporary tactical advantage against Donald Trump and millions of angry conspiracy mongers out there. The document confirms, as much as any such item can, that Barack Hussein Obama II was born at 7:24 p.m. on August 4, 1961 at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu.
The lingering question of whether the man meets the constitutional requirements to be President of the United States — specifically, that he is a native-born citizen — is answered. He does. And, specifically, he is.
But, if you look a little more deeply into the hard typeface of the Certificate of Live Birth, you can see some evidence of the background that drives a person like Obama. Indulge me in a little armchair Freud.
According to the document, the president’s mother — Stanley Ann Dunham — was 18 years old when she delivered him. That’s very young by any reasonable standard, young enough to make the baby’s arrival seem reckless and ill-advised. A heavy burden to bear, especially when you were the baby in question.
And there’s the bureaucratic judgment in the Certificate’s explication that the mother’s name did not match the name of the child’s father. The 18-year-old girl signed the Certificate “Ann Dunham Obama,” a small act of revolt against the officious document’s implication of illegitimacy.
Good for her.
Many ask, now that Obama has released this Certificate, why he didn’t do it sooner. I have an idea. He’s been protecting his mother from the harsh judgment of petty tyrants.
How many bureaucratic sneers did she suffer, bearing and raising a mixed-race child in the early 1960s? How many dirty looks, when she carried him on buses or airplanes? Brought him to campus at the several universities she attended? Applied for passports? Applied for food stamps?
And how soon did little Barack II realize that authority figures judged his mother harshly? That official forms made unfriendly assumptions about her marital status? How quickly did other kids say unkind things about his . . . unconventional . . . mom? Kids in Hawaii. Kids in Kansas. Kids in Indonesia.
The facts around Stanley Ann Dunham’s life are hazy and are likely to remain so. This is the haze created by family members protecting a loved one they know needs the help. A foolish daughter. An eccentric mother.
There are different versions of when or even whether Stanley Ann and the elder Obama married. Apparently, they never lived together as husband and wife; and the President’s own wife has said that his mother was “very single when she had him.”
There’s a hard edge in that last bit, even from his wife. Young Michelle Robinson — from an intact, upright, churchgoing family headed by a father who was a civil servant — had plenty of occasions to judge foolish teenage mothers on food stamps. You can practically hear it in the very that she uses to modify single. Michelle wasn’t going to bounce around a bunch of motley state schools with a baby on her hip; she was going to Princeton.
For most of his 50 years, Barack Obama has been protecting his mother from judgments and slights. Since she passed away in the ‘90s, he’s been protecting her ghost. He’s the archetypal high-achiever from a dysfunctional family. That’ll never change.
And that archetypal sort is precisely who seeks the presidency in this dysfunctional age.
Trump and Obama’s other antagonists have already moved on to press the President to make public his transcripts from college and law school, as previous presidents have. Their assumption, which Obama himself has tacitly acknowledged in his memoirs, is that he was a mediocre student who advanced through elite academia on affirmative action preferences.
Here’s a prediction: Obama will never release those transcripts. His birth certificate — his entrance into this world — is a testament to what the Babbitts deemed his foolish mother’s recklessness and immaturity. But his Ivy League degrees are the armor he built to protect her and himself from those judgments. And slights. And dirty looks.
He’s not going to lower that.
And, in this narrow Freudian context, good for him. It isn’t a good idea, tactically — and it’s poor form, personally — to mess with a man’s coping mechanisms.
