By George E. Curry

Reacting  to a circus-like atmosphere created by two-time presidential flirt Donald Trump and the news media acting as willing accomplices, Barack Obama released his long-form birth certificate on Wednesday in an effort to end the manufactured controversy over whether he was born in Hawaii and therefore qualified to serve as president of the United States.

Obama said the Trump-ed up issue, first raised during the 2008 presidential campaign, had been revived and recently mushroomed into an enormous distraction that takes away from solving larger issues facing the nation.

“I am confident that the American people and America’s political leaders can come together in a bipartisan way and solve these problems,” President Obama told reporters at the White House. “We always have. But we’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.”

Even though Obama opponents tried to move the birther sideshow to center stage, their wild-eyed claims had been thoroughly discredited.

Obama addressed the issue directly by posting a copy of his birth certificate, called “Certification of Live Birth,” on his campaign Website.  It was issued by the Hawaii Department of Health and showed that Barack Hussein Obama, II was born in Honolulu, Hawaii at 7:24 p.m. on August 4, 1961. It listed his parents as Ann Dunham Obama, a Caucasian, and Barack Hussein Obama, a Kenyan.

Both the Aug. 13, 1961 Honolulu Advertiser and the following day’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin, carried an identical birth announcement: “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hgy., son, Aug. 4.”

In addition, various news accounts quoted Dr. Chlyome Fukino, former director of the Hawaii Department of Health and a Republican, as saying she has seen the original birth certificate and has no doubt that Obama was born in Hawaii.

Several independent bodies, including FactCheck.org, looked into the issue and concluded that Obama’s birth had been fully and properly documented.

The phony charge had been so soundly dismissed that many high-profile Republicans had discontinued raising the issue.  Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who vetoed an Arizona bill that would have required  presidential candidates to prove that they were natural-born citizens as required by the U.S. constitution, said the birther issue is leading the country “down a path of destruction.”

The conservative National Review begrudgingly said of Obama, “Like Bruce Springsteen, he has a lot of bad political ideas; but he was born in the U.S.A.”

Even Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, declared in one recent television interview that the birther movement is “over.”

Not quite. Enter Donald Trump. He single-handedly revived a campaign against Obama that is as fake as his hair. I wrote a column deconstructing many of Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations.  But Trump understands this is all about politics. And from a political standpoint, Obama held –and lost – the advantage.

According to a CNN poll conducted in March, 72 percent of Americans believe President Obama was either definitely or probably born in the United States. A slight majority of Republicans polled – 52 percent – share that view. Among independents, the key swing group, 74 percent believe Obama was definitely or probably born in the U.S.A.

Instead of legitimizing Trump’s illegitimate charges about the legitimacy of his U.S. citizenship, Obama should have drawn a line in the sand.

The president should have stated: “I’ve been discussing this politically-based silliness for more than two years, I have documented my birth with an official document from Hawaii, and health department officials there have answered endless questions about the authenticity of my birth records. At some point, we have to say enough is enough – and we’ve reached that point. With our country engaged in two wars and partially engaged in a third, with thousands of Americans struggling to find work to feed their families and with both political parties striving  to address critical budgetary issues, I will not waste another second seeking to satisfy the conspiracy buffs. Going forward, I am going to focus my full attention on the critical problems facing America and will not discuss this phony issue of whether I am a U.S. citizen again. Voters elected us to solve problems, not to engage in discredited conspiracy theories.”

Americans like presidents who are strong, even when they disagree with them. Instead of standing up to the lunatics, however, Obama wimped out. He had already produced a birth record that states accept for obtaining a driver’s license and the federal government recognizes for issuing passports. That should have been enough. It wasn’t, so Obama made public his long form  birth certificate (PDF). In doing so, he acknowledged, “I know there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.”

Instead of admitting that he was wrong, Donald Trump brazenly took credit for forcing Obama to produce his birth certificate. Trump conveniently ignored that the long form contained the identical information previously disclosed. And instead of saying the matter should be closed, Trump shifted gears and began taking aim at Obama’s academic record at Harvard, where the future president graduated in the top 10 percent of his class and was elected president of the Harvard Law Review.

“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible,” Trump said in an interview with the Associated Press. “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?…Let him show his records.”

When will journalists demand that Trump show his records? When will he be forced to explain his various business bankruptcies?

In this controversy, the news media behaved more like stenographers than journalists. Although they were aware the birther claims were without substance, they acted as though they were on Donald Trump’s payroll, pressing White House officials to release Obama’s long form birth certificate while timidly challenging Trump to prove his allegations.

A notable exception was Anderson Cooper’s interview with Trump. Armed with the facts and research from a team of CNN reporters who had spent a week in Hawaii investigating Trump’s birther claims, Cooper carefully dismantled each Trump assertion point-by-point.

We’ll need more of that kind of dogged journalism – and a president who does not give in to clowns – as the circus moves to another city. Next stop: Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. He can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com You can also follow him at www.twitter.com/currygeorge.