A Republican running for a Senate seat in Arkansas said Wednesday that he didn’t know whether President Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen, despite proof that’s been provided by the president and the state of Hawaii.
Curtis Coleman, a North Little Rock businessman, said he thinks the president should be forced to produce his birth certificate. Hawaii officials have issued multiple statements saying records prove Obama is a natural-born U.S. citizen, and Obama’s campaign posted a copy of his birth certificate on its Web site during the 2008 presidential race.
Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 to an American mother and a Kenyan father.
“I’m not aware that his birth certificate has ever been published or seen, which I think should be a concern to every American,” Coleman told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday. “If his citizenship is based on his place of birth, and we’ve never seen his birth certificate, then how could we know?”
When asked about the proof provided by Obama’s campaign and Hawaii, Coleman said: “I have not seen that, and I have not kept up with that issue.”
Coleman made similar comments earlier Wednesday in an interview with TolbertReport.com, a conservative blog, and earlier in response to a caller on Little Rock radio station KARN.
So-called birthers claim Obama is ineligible to be president because, they argue, he was actually born outside the United States and therefore doesn’t meet a constitutional requirement to be president. A federal judge last year threw out a lawsuit questioning Obama’s citizenship, lambasting the case as a waste of the court’s time.
The nonpartisan Web site Factcheck.org examined the original document and said it does have a raised seal and the usual evidence of a genuine document. In addition, Factcheck.org reproduced an announcement of Obama’s birth, including his parents’ address in Honolulu, that was published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961.
Coleman is one of eight Republicans seeking the party’s nomination for the Senate seat held by Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln. Lincoln faces a challenge in the May 18 primary from Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.
Coleman, who managed former Gov. Mike Huckabee’s unsuccessful Senate bid in 1992, told a Little Rock television station in February that embryonic stem cell research was similar to “what the Nazis did to the Jews.”
Democrats urged Republicans in the race to repudiate Coleman’s comments. Lincoln’s campaign said she’s never doubted Obama’s citizenship.
“We believe each of the eight Republicans running for the United States Senate from Arkansas ought to be clear with voters if they believe the president is a citizen of the country or not,” said Eric Schultz, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.