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The birth certificate is out; the skeptics still aren't satisfied; the rest of the world has rolled its eyes at the whole thing. And now the think pieces are starting to appear: What was the birth certificate issue really about? More specifically--was it ever about anything other than race?
"It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious 'other' would have been conducted against a white president," read an editorial in The New York Times yesterday. "We doubt that the questions about Mr. Obama's birthplace would have taken off if his father had been from Canada rather than Kenya," read a similar editorial at The Washington Post. "Obama, as a politician, is clearly not a radical; he is a center-left pragmatist," wrote David Remnick at The New Yorker Web site yesterday. "The one radical thing about Barack Obama is his race, his name."
USA Today had an item yesterday about a recent psychology study exploring the relationship between racism and birther beliefs. "Does racial prejudice play a role in questions about Barack Obama's citizenship, a topic much in the news given today's birth certificate news conference?" the story begins. "Yes indeed."