What Birthers Want

In the new issue of Rolling Stone, contributing editor Tim Dickinson investigates how Republican operatives are using pages from Karl Rove's old playbook to run a secret campaign to kill health care reform. In this online exclusive, Dickinson talks with the queen of the more organically formed Birther movement, Orly Taitz, who explains — as only a Moldova-born lawyer/oral surgeon/real estate agent can — why her followers are heaping hate on the president and his agenda.

Much of the noise at the August town halls had nothing to do with health care. Irate "Birthers" who reject evidence of Barack Obama's citizenship, turned out in droves to denounce the president as a foreign agent, or as one Birther sign in New Hampshire put it, "the Trojan Horse of Islam."

The Birthers have been egged on by members of the GOP who have winkingly raised doubts about Obama's birthright, including Rep. Bill Posey of Florida ("I can't swear on a stack of Bibles whether he is or isn't") and Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who believes the Birthers "have a point" and said of their crazed fearmongering, "I don't discourage it."

It's easy to understand why: Forty-four percent of Republicans believe Obama is foreign-born, with another 20 percent unsure, according to an August PPP poll. The Republican base and the Birther movement are nearly one and the same, says PPP pollster Dean Debnam. "That is really who their core is."

As I detail in my current Rolling Stone magazine piece, "The Lie Machine," the panic over Obama's health care objectives has been manufactured. But doubts about Obama's citizenship are more organic, growing out of the same wellspring of fear that gave rise to claims that Obama is secretly a Muslim.