Obama IS an American.

So today I had a patron call in what was either panic or hopefulness and she asked me to explain to her what constitutes a "natural born citizen." Mind you we played twenty questions before her real question was revealed but in the end she was trying to verify that Senator Obama was indeed actually qualified to run for president. She had apparently been watching some expose television or listening to talk radio.

The truth is there are lawsuits trying to prove Obama is not eligible to be president. Mind you Senator McCain had some issues himself, being born in the Panama Canal Naval Hospital, but Obama's life is more complex than being born on foreign soil to U.S. Citizens. He has the distinction of having only 1 parent who was a U.S. Citizen, his mother who was 18 at the time of his birth. Normally that is all it takes. One U.S. parent and you are in. As long as that parent had spent at least 10 years in the U.S. and five of those years after the age of 16. Since his mother was 18 when he was born it was not enough to make him a natural born citizen IF he was born on foreign soil. For the record Senator Obama states he was born in Hawaii in 1961. Two years after it became a state. That should be he end of it. But there are other factors. His paternal grandmother has made claims he was born in Kenya, and was taken to Hawaii and issued a certificate.

He was a Kenyan citizen at birth because his father was Kenyan. That citizenship expired at age 21, because he did not swear an Oath of Allegiance to Kenya. And at the time dual citizenship was allowed with Kenya. But there are other factors that muddy the picture. He was adopted by his step-father in Indonesia and was issued an Indonesian passport. There was no-dual citizenship allowed between the US and Indonesia at that time, so the naysayers are claiming he actually dissolved his US citizenship, and when he came back he would have had to be "Naturalized" and take the oath to be a citizen again. They claim he never did.

All this is still in court, but for my part I find it ludicrous to suggest that with the media and the political digging going on today that we could ever believe a man could be this close to the White House without all this stuff being vetted is crazy. There will always be conspiracy theories. Even when Obama's campaign posted his birth certificate on his website, claims of forgery were immediately made. It will all come out in court eventually. My question is this. If a Harvard educated lawyer decided to run for president do you really think he'd try it if he couldn't win his case?