Friar Bijou wrote:
The question here is "who, prior to Obama, was publicly asked to produce a long form birth certificate?"
I already answered this. While birth certificates did not become common documents until after the creation of Social Security, every single presidential candidate for which there was a question as to whether they met the natural born citizen requirement has had to face the need to prove their status. I already mentioned George Romney, who ran against Nixon in the GOP primary back in 68. He faced the same natural born citizen requirement questions that Obama faced. In his cases though, facts in his birth certificate were not the issue. He was born in Mexico. The legal question was whether he was a natural born citizen as a result of both of his parents being US citizens.
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George Romney himself was unequivocal.
"I am a natural born citizen. My parents were American citizens. I was a citizen at birth," he said, according to a typewritten statement found in his archives.
At one point, the Congressional Research Service - an arm of the Library of Congress that is supposed to provide authoritative but impartial research for elected members - advised that its analysts agreed with George Romney, according to a congressional source.
In a paper in November aimed at clarifying presidential eligibility, the Congressional Research Service declared that the practical, legal meaning of "natural born citizen" would "most likely include" not only anyone born on U.S. soil but anyone born overseas of at least one parent who was a U.S. citizen.
See how he actually went out and got an official determination of his status? See how Obama
didn't do this, but instead just handwaved the issue away, put it before the court of public opinion, and in the process created a conflict over it?
There's your difference. Like I already said. Everyone else who has faced this issue in that past (and there's been a number of them) has done everything they could to prove their eligibility for the office. Obama did the exact opposite. He seemed to deliberately and unnecessarily want to create questions about his legal status.
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I'll wait right here for the appropriate links to said past requests.
You are missing the forest for the freaking trees. It's not about the specific document. It's about the requirement to prove that one is a natural born citizen. In Obama's case, this would best be done by providing his long form birth certificate. Just because that precise document isn't required in every case (like with Romney and McCain), does not mean that in Obama's case, it's not needed.
I mentioned Chester Arthur earlier. He, like Obama, never provided his birth certificate. Of course, in his case, he had a great excuse. He was born in 1829, and the state of Vermont didn't start keeping birth records until 1957 (and neither did the town he was born in). Obama did not have that excuse. He had a long form birth certificate, on file, in the state of Hawaii records, the entire time. He could have trivially provided them. He chose not to.
And just for completeness sake, here's a
guy who did more research on this than I'm willing to do.
Note that he's only looking at the last 50 years or so. You'll also note how a couple presidents have birth certificates filled out well after their births. That's because of the whole "no need for one until Social Security came along". Well, and likely employment for the first time that required such a thing. Point being that it's not like this is such a hard thing to do. Obama just made it so.