Doug Mills/The New York Times President Obama said he had decided to release his full birth certificate because the country did not have “time for this kind of silliness.”President Obama on Wednesday posted online a copy of his long-form birth certificate from the State of Hawaii, hoping to finally end a long-simmering conspiracy theory among some conservatives who have asserted that he was not born in the United States and was not a legitimate president.
The birth certificate, which is posted on the White House Web site, shows that Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu and is signed by state officials and his mother.
“The president believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country,” Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, wrote on the Web site Wednesday morning. Mr. Pfeiffer said on the site that Mr. Obama had authorized officials in Hawaii, who had routinely made available a shorter version of the birth certificate, to release the longer, more complete document.
Mr. Obama said Wednesday that he had decided to release the document in an effort to end the “silliness” about his birth, which threatened to distract the country from serious issues.
“Over the last two and a half years, I have watched with bemusement,” he said in brief remarks at the White House. “I’ve been puzzled by the degree to which this thing just kept on going.”
Mr. Obama said there would be a “segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.” But he said that he was “speaking to the vast majority of the American people as well as to the press — we do not have time for this kind of silliness.”
The president said he decided to release the long-form birth certificate two weeks ago, after news reports about the controversy dominated a week in which Republicans released their 2012 budget and Mr. Obama gave a speech on the nation’s debt.
“This is going to generate huge and serious debates, important debates,” Mr. Obama said of those issues. “That’s how democracy is supposed to work.”
But, he added, “We are not going to be able to do it if we are distracted.”
“We are not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other,” he said. “We are not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts.”
He also called out, without using names, Republicans like Donald Trump who have repeatedly raised the birth certificate issue, saying that the political process should ignore the “sideshows and carnival barkers.”
The contention that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore did not meet the constitutional requirement to be elected president, has been around for years and has long been refuted. But it recently gained more public attention after Mr. Trump, the real estate mogul, raised questions as he explored whether to run for president.
In a news conference Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump claimed credit for forcing Mr. Obama’s hand, saying, “I feel I’ve accomplished something really, really important.” But he said the document released Wednesday would have to be examined for authenticity.
“I hope it’s the right deal,” he said. “We have to look at it. A lot of people have to look at it. I hope it’s true, and the reason I hope it’s true is because we have real problems in this country.”
Mr. Obama’s appearance on television — even as Mr. Trump was holding forth in New Hampshire — offered a sharp contrast for the White House, which is eager to portray the president as focused on the serious issues facing the country.
As he began his comments, the president joked about the networks’ willingness to break into their normal programming to carry Mr. Trump’s news conference. But Mr. Obama was eager to make it clear that Republicans who persist in discussing his birth certificate are not confronting the nation’s more serious problems.
White House officials had for years sought to ignore questions about Mr. Obama’s birth, pointing to the shorter form as sufficient to end the questions.
In July 2009, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary at the time, dismissed the “made-up fictional nonsense of whether or not the president was born in this country.”
But the so-called birther controversy continued as polls showed that large numbers of people said they were not confident that Mr. Obama was, in fact, born in the country.
Many of the doubters suggested that Mr. Obama could not produce the long-form birth certificate because they assumed that it did not exist. His decision to produce the document is an effort to disprove those accusations.
