On April 27, 2011 President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, finally answering charges from many quarters that he is not a Natural Born Citizen. “Birthers” can debate the validity of the document if it pleases them, but they are missing the point.

In the presser announcing the release, a petulant President Obama said those who doubted his birthplace were “silly” and likened them to a carnival sideshow. He dismissed such matters as “distractions” and lamented that the question of his birthplace was a big waste of time. He blamed “birthers” for manufacturing this issue to smear him.

That is a curious perspective, given the fact that President Obama has nobody but himself to blame for the controversy. If this was just a distraction, why did he refuse to put it to bed for two and a half years? And not just refused. During that time he has spent vast sums of money to fight the various court cases that attempted to force the release of his birth certificate. Nor did the defense argue on solid legal grounds, but rather resorted to thin legal technicalities and trickery, none of which ever addressed the central issue, which was the question of whether the sitting President of the United States was eligible to serve in that office under the Constitution.

It would have been a simple matter, if then-Senator Obama truly wanted to avoid silliness, distractions and wasting time, to release the document 30 months ago. Instead, he chose to dodge, duck, weave and hire teams of high-powered attorneys to prevent the very thing that would have ended the controversy once and for all. That refusal was the singular life-support machinery that kept the controversy alive. Nobody else is responsible for that but Barack Obama himself.

Clearly, President Obama and the Democratic Party believe Americans are the dumbest people alive. How else to explain their assertion that the President could not release his birth certificate earlier due to a regulation that required it be kept locked away – even from President Obama? That claim is so ridiculous as to be downright insulting. Even to attempt to make that argument is to reveal the direst contempt for American voters.

Is there a single individual anywhere in America – even one – who cannot go to the town hall in the hamlet where he was born and obtain his own birth certificate? Surely there are cases in which city halls have burned to the ground or records were destroyed in a flood, or something of that sort. In those cases, special provisions are made so that individuals may go through life with legal documentation to prove their identities. Yet those extenuating circumstances were never claimed about Obama. He asserts that he would have loved to release the document almost three years earlier, but was barred from doing so by some obscure and unnamed regulation or prohibition that exists nowhere on America. Is there a town hall in either the largest metropolis or the remotest village where a citizen cannot simply walk in, present identification, pay a fee, and emerge with an official birth certificate? It is the towering height of hubris to argue these things when virtually every adult in the country has had to deal with these government bureaucracies at some point and knows full well how they work.

How could a sitting President make such a claim to the American people, a people who are intelligent, industrious, and basically honest, when virtually all of them know the claim to be so preposterous as to be deeply insulting? The answer is simple. This President relies upon the faithful service of the mainstream media, who backs his plays, covers his tracks and pushes whatever narrative the President wants pushed. They believe their job is “to make this administration work.” They are his loyal servants, his lapdogs, his henchmen, his stooges. He can depend upon them to present his most outrageous lies as unassailable truth, just as they have done through the entire “birther” controversy.

Yet their propaganda has failed miserably, if a recent poll is any guide. The day before Obama released his birth certificate, USA Today published the results of a poll that showed a mere 38% of Americans had confidence that Obama is a Natural Born citizen. No sane person could claim that USA Today is a Right-wing outlet. In fact, although that paper is nowhere near as radical-Left as the New York Times or Washington Post, it is still quite Left-leaning and therefore the poll is that much more illuminating. Who could argue with such a result from a newspaper much more given to praise this President undeservedly than to criticize him when he has earned it? Whereas the Left claims that only crackpots in tinfoil hats questioned Obama’s eligibility, the poll proved that the “birther” question is a mainstream issue – and Americans want the question answered. It is no coincidence that within a day of the publication of that poll, President Obama completely reversed himself and announced out of the blue that he finally would release the looked-for document. Coming as it did on the heels of the courageous Donald Trump’s unflinching demands for the same answer, the poll surely alarmed this President, who reacted by suddenly doing what he should have done 30 months earlier.

Since when is it “crackpot” territory to expect that the POTUS is eligible for the job under the requirements of the Constitution? If it had been a GOP candidate in question, the media would have demanded the answer then – and conducted the most thorough investigations too. It is only when the question involves a Democrat that the media mocks those who simply believe the law must apply to all. Obama has made a very serious mistake in delaying the release of his birth certificate all this time, for the refusal to let it be seen has fostered deep suspicion, the mischaracterization of “birthers” as crackpots and worse has created resentment among ordinary Americans, and now no matter how authentic the birth certificate may be there will still be those who maintain their suspicions. President Obama has, to use his own words, “acted stupidly” in this matter and thereby brought that distrust upon himself. He got it the old fashioned way – he earned it.

Mr McNamara is a political blogger, and author of “Chuckleheads,” a collection of non-political satire tales available for download at Amazon.com.