More conservatives denounce birthers

Time to add Bill Pascoe, a former GOP operative now blogging at CQ Politics, the editors of National Review (via Andrew Sullivan), and Mary Katherine Ham of The Weekly Standard to the growing list of conservatives (headed by Michael Medved) who have denounced the Obama birth certificate myth. As I noted yesterday, even Ann Coulter and American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. have disowned it. When will leading members of the GOP do the same?

Update 7/29 11:39 AM: Per Jay's comment below, I've retitled this post (previously, it was "More conservatives exit birther bandwagon").

Update 7/29 12:38 PM: Per the last sentence of the post, I'm delighted to see that GOP chairman Michael Steele has finally spoken out against the birther movement (via Ben Smith). Here's the key portion of the statement that was provided to Greg Sargent by an RNC spokesperson: "Chairman Steele believes that this is an unnecessary distraction and believes that the president is a U.S. citizen."

Update 7/29 3:09 PM: One step forward, two steps back -- conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt is also denouncing the myth, but Rep. Roy Blunt just called the issue a "legitimate question" and Rep. Louie Gohmert signed on yesterday as a cosponsor of Rep. Bill Posey's birther-inspired bill in Congress.

Comments

[Jay]

Brendan, doesn't one need to actually be ON the birther bandwagon to exit it? That headline makes it appear as though these are people who believed it at one time and are coming to their senses rather than people who have dismissed it from the beginning.

[bnyhan]

That's a fair point -- thanks. Changed the title accordingly.

[dave mazella]

Brendan,

I understand that some Republicans would want to disown their own or the party's ties to the birthers. I think conservative media commentators, especially, would be interested in keeping some credibility outside partisan circles, so I'm not shocked that Medved has taken up his position, for whatever reason.

But Steele's position seems to me closer to the rhetorical strategy of the Posey bill, which is supposed on the one hand to "quell unnecessary controversies" (while on the other hand prolonging the controversies by continuing to discuss them and conjure them up in people's heads). See, for example, this report:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/chronicle/6558278.html

In other words, what you are depicting as a peeling away of Republican elite opinion might simply be part of a strategy to keep a more acceptable "official" position visible to the media, even while encouraging a very different attitude among the base. Since this seems to have been the (none too successful) strategy of the McCain campaign during the Palin rallies, I don't think this is an unreasonable question.

So to what extent could this practice of Republican "denunciation" be yet another strategy not to correct but to prolong the misperception, as you discuss in your earlier posts about the difficulty of correcting such misperceptions? How do we distinguish the bad-faith from good-faith efforts, if we wish to pursue your "shame the elites" response?

Thanks,

DM