Hawaii '61

So, the most controversial document of the last few years is...Barack Obama's birth certificate. Not content with the 'short' copy of his birth certificate released in 2008, political campaigners have continued to pressurise the U.S. President into revealing his 'full' birth certificate, which he did today. Congratulations to all the 'birthers' who have tirelessly fought for this moment. No, really. After all the economic turmoil, political peaks and troughs and, more recently, unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, it's good to see that a minority have their eyes firmly set on the key issue: whether their President was born in the U.S..

Now, don't get me wrong, if it were proved Obama was not born in America, that would have been a significant legislative issue. But no more than that. In the grand scheme of things, the obsession with a leader's birthplace is quite ridiculous: his political decisions were not made because he was born in Hawaii, they were made because they represent what he believes is necessary. Donald Trump's comments before and after the release of the full birth certificate only serve to perpetuate this nonsensical obsession with Obama's birthplace. Nevertheless, hopefully the ludicrously high number of people in the U.S. who believe that Obama was brought into this world outside of America will finally realise the truth and, should they choose to do so, challenge the U.S. President over his policies, rather than his background.

As a non-American, I find the whole affair laughable; that a politician be forced to publicly reveal his birth certificate and have it posted all over the internet is indicative of a political system where politics is secondary to personality. Furthermore, no matter what anyone might say about this not being a racial matter, it is. I don't remember a clamour in 2001 for George W. Bush Junior's birth certificate. The whole affair may well be a case of Conservative sore losers refusing to accept Obama's leadership but, at the end of the day, it is also a reminder that some American political figures feel that a man with African ethnic roots cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the country of his birth. In the supposedly multicultural 21st Century, it is not the message that the U.S. should be sending out to countries where it is ostensibly trying to promote 'democracy' and 'freedom'.