While stumping in his native Michigan today, Mitt Romney cracked a birth certificate joke. He told a crowd in the town of Commerce that he was born in a nearby hospital. Romney then added, “No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate, they know that this is the place that we were born and raised.”
Today on msnbc‘s PoliticsNation, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post told Rev. Al Sharpton, “If you just look at this as a political matter, it does him no good. If he wanted to be a birther, he should have done that back in the primary… I think that’s why you see his campaign running from this. This goes in the gaffe category… His brain was not working when he did this.”
Ultimately, reactions from political pundits have ranged from outrage to “meh.” As Dave Weigel points out today in a post for Slate, the whole “birther” notion is so ridiculous to 99.99984579% of the country** that the President has often made jokes about it, himself.
You can buy an overpriced coffee mug from Team Obama’s website with the President’s birth certificate on it. The President’s longform birth certificate is even posted to the White House website, as is President Obama’s correspondence with Hawaii state officials showing his request to release said birth certificate.
So what do you think? Was Romney’s joke a big deal or is the whole thing being overblown? **I totally made up that statistic
Nick Ramsey
Nick Ramsey is a senior producer with MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” Recommended
