Hawaii Gov. to Take on "Birthers"
The New York Times reports:
HONOLULU — Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, who befriended President Obama’s parents when they were university students here, has been in office for less than three weeks. But he is so incensed over “birthers” — the conspiracy theorists who assert that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and was thus not eligible to become president — that he is seeking ways to change state policy to allow him to release additional proof that the president was born in Honolulu in 1961.
“It’s an insult to his mother and to his father, and I knew his mother and father; they were my friends, and I have an emotional interest in that,” Governor Abercrombie said in a telephone interview late Thursday. “It’s an emotional insult. It is disrespectful to the president; it is disrespectful to the office.”
The governor, a Democrat and former congressman, said he has initiated conversations with the state’s attorney general and the chief of its Health Department about how he can release more explicit documentation of Mr. Obama’s birth on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital. He said he has done so of his own accord, without consulting the White House, which declined to comment.
“He’s a big boy; he can take sticks and stones. But there’s no reason on earth to have the memory of his parents insulted by people whose motivation is solely political,” Mr. Abercrombie said. “Let’s put this particular canard to rest.”
Mr. Abercrombie was regarded as an independent operator in Congress, a free spirit who embodies his state’s “aloha” tradition of inclusiveness and harmony. He returned a reporter’s phone call at 11:30 p.m. on Thursday — he had just gotten the message, he said, and was worried about deadlines — and spent 30 minutes chatting animatedly about Mr. Obama, Hawaii and his own recent election, saying that he had based his campaign on “our diversity defining us rather than dividing us” — much the same message that Mr. Obama used in 2008.
Now that he is in office, Mr. Abercrombie is facing a $71 million deficit this year and 10 times that amount in the years to come. Mr. Obama talked about the problem at a news conference Wednesday in Washington when he spoke, imprecisely, about “schools that are laying off so many teachers that they start going to four days a week, as they’ve done in Hawaii, for example.” In fact, Hawaii instituted furloughs to avoid layoffs.
