In an otherwise admirable op-ed criticizing birtherism, Peter Wehner tries to draw an equivalence to Democratic opposition to George W. Bush:
There’s more than a partisan cost to all this. Mr. Trump is succumbing to a pernicious temptation in American politics: not simply to disagree with political opponents, but to try to delegitimize them. The argument isn’t simply that Mr. Obama is wrong on almost every public policy matter (which I believe he is). Rather, the argument is that his presidency is unconstitutional and that he is alien.
Something like this happened with Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, who inspired such rage in some of his critics that they deemed his presidency illicit.
In self-governing societies, there have to be unwritten rules by which we abide. Among them is that we accept the outcome of elections and keep our public debates tethered to reality.
As Wehner notes, there’s nothing but paranoia keeping birtherism afloat. The sense that Bush was illegitimate stemmed from the fact that he lost the popular vote and that the Supreme Court intervened by halting a recount in Florida, in an opinion that has never since been cited by the Justices. The perception on the left that Bush was an illegitimate president persisted longer than it should have–the electoral college is a written rule we’ve agreed to abide by–but there’s really no comparison between birtherism and anger over the 2000 election.
