was, a Manhattanite who thought that Obama was unfit to be president because the details surrounding his birth were insufficient to satisfy the stipulation of the Constitution of the United States that the President be born on US soil.
Why would a New Yorker subscribe to a view that in the opinion of most of the people this person would come into contact with was held only by the paranoid lunacies of the American fringe and not the self-styled connoisseurs of broadmindedness that proliferated like so many locally sourced radishes in these estimable climes? Well, that would seem to be for legal reasons, with this person willing to take the life of hosted dinner party into their hands under the guise of “the law is the law.” And given the preceding conviviality of the occasion, this would seem the typical place a New Yorker would conceivably occupy in the wide spectrum of the birther mindset: the New York birther is not likely to protest that the president is, hence a Muslim or a foreign agent, but just subject to the law like anyone else and must meet the letter of the law in all its dimensions.
Almost as compelling, however, was the reaction of the fellow party-goers to this bombshell thrown in their midst. For while there might have been every reason to fling numerous counterarguments and stomp out in a huff (always less successful in New York where you have to wait for an elevator rather than screeching off to leave tire tracks across their prized zinnias), the crowd stayed, if testily, to argue it out with them. Perhaps that says as much about the health or perhaps orneriness of the social atmospherics being breathed in these days: for here was someone who risked being a social pariah, i.e. humored, mollified, then never to be spoken to again except inasmuch as their social earth was salted as a consequence of their statements, actually being permitted to live another day.
How much they knew how close to the wind they sailed in their 19th century views is debatable, though my hunch is that, given the person’s demonstrable intelligence in other matters, it is likely. Most plausible, then, was that it was part of a desire to drop the heavy stuff right into the maw of the holiday cordialities, the uptown chatterer equivalent of flashing a roll of bills as a way of saying that
