Before President Obama released his longform birth certificate, I kinda figured that if and when he did that, it wouldn't make more than a smidgen of difference; that the number of Americans who tell pollsters he wasn't born here would scarcely decline. In fact, it might even increase. All the usual suspects would find some semi-convincing way to argue that whatever he put out there was an obvious forgery and the story would dominate the news for weeks and drive more of those who don't like Obama's policies (at least the way Fox News and the Republican Spin Machine represent them) into the birther camp.
Didn't work out that way. Obama released the longform and birtherism took a sizeable hit, at least if we believe the few polls that have been done. Brendan Nyhan discusses why this might be.
His reasons all seem valid but I'd like to suggest a better one. I think birthers had stopped wanting to be birthers. The movement was becoming so nutcase crazy that it was becoming embarrassing to some to be a part of it. It was also hard. When your friends asked you to explain those birth announcements in the newspapers or how come the state of Hawaii (with a Republican governor, no less) certified the short form certificate you had to insist was bogus, you didn't have an explanation. You didn't even have a credible fantasy as to how that might have been accomplished. You had to fall back on something like, "The President has great power to arrange things so he just arranged all that." And even you didn't really buy that as a response.
Plus, we'd lately had a lot of prominent Republicans cautiously distancing themselves from that mob or even suggesting that birtherism was harming the G.O.P. cause. Even John Boehner, the man some of them hope will ram through their agenda, was sending pretty clear signals that he wished they'd shut up about the President's birthplace.
So what do you do if you're an avowed birther and you want off that bus? You can't just suddenly say, "Hey, I've been thinking. I know I said that there was incontrovertible, undeniable evidence that Obama was born in Kenya but I've just decided there isn't." A lot of people in this country would rather change their sex than their minds — and birtherism attracted a particularly stubborn, angry lot.
Ergo, my theory: A lot of birthers wanted out. The release of the long form gave them not only a good opportunity to climb down but maybe their last. It gave them the chance to say, "All I ever wanted was to have this document released and now I'm satisfied," thereby spinning it as a "win" rather than as proof they were wrong. I think a lot of them grabbed that opportunity…and some of us may even owe them an apology. We didn't think any of them were smart enough to do something like that.