Birther Group Launches National Ad Campaign Seeking To Disqualify Obama From Reelection

By Ian Millhiser/Think Progress

A birther organization known as the Conservative Majority Fund is currently running a national ad campaign claiming that it can disqualify President Obama from running for reelection. While the ad is steeped in the rhetoric of the birther movement, it goes far beyond simply claiming that Obama was not born in the United States. Indeed, the ad manages to cram a truly stunning number of far right conspiracy theories into just one minute of air time:

Who is Barack Obama? We know less about this man than any other President in American history. What’s he hiding? His autobiography is full of fictional characters. But there’s a lot more than that. If you try to look into his past, you run into a brick wall.

His college records at Columbia, sealed! His college records at Harvard, sealed! We don’t know what his thesis papers were about because those are sealed too. He Selective Service record is sealed. His records as an attorney are sealed. He has a Connecticut Social Security number and we can’t get answers about that either.

And no one — I mean no one — has seen an actual physical copy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

The fact is, if we don’t know who Barack Obama is, we shouldn’t even have him as a candidate for president. Let’s disqualify Obama before the Democratic National Convention. Call today to sign the demand to disqualify Obama. . . .We need 10,000 signatures from every congressional district to boot this guy off the ballot and have the Democrats nominate someone else.

Watch it:

The ad identifies no actual legal basis for its claim that a sitting president can be forced to give up his reelection bid if enough of his political opponents sign a petition.

As the ad’s announcer reads his script, a chryon runs at the bottom asking questions such as “What is [Obama's] connection to Bill Ayers?” “What is his current relationship with Rev. Wright?” and “Who paid for his Harvard Education?” The Conservative Majority fund’s website also appears entirely devoted to promoting far right myths, including a campaign to keep the United Nations from seizing people’s guns, an attack on the Obama Administration’s supposed “deep and dirty involvement in the the Fast & Furious gun-running scandal,” and multiple pages devoted to fighting the nearly non-existent problem of voter fraud. Their birther petition calling for Congress to “investigate Barack Obama’s forged birth certificate” prominently features anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The Conservative Majority Fund only filed its initial papers with the Federal Elections Commission a month ago, and has not yet disclosed the extent of its spending on this ad. Their spending is significant enough, however, that the ad ran simultaneously on both CNN and Fox News this morning, and it is twice the length of a normal campaign ad.