March 18, 2012

Americans finally getting message about possibly ineligible president

Editor’s note: This is another in a series of “WND/WENZEL POLLS” conducted exclusively for WND by the public-opinion research and media consulting company Wenzel Strategies.

Questions have been raised about Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president since before his election, but with a mainstream media leading cheers for him many Americans haven’t realized the seriousness of the situation – the possibility that the sitting president is ineligible and constitutionally devoid of authority to sign bills, set foreign policy or even host lavish parties for friends in the White House.

That’s changing, and a large part of the reason is that Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., conducted a six-month Cold Case Posse investigation that has concluded there is probable cause that there was forgery in the creation of the image of Obama’s “Certificate of Live Birth” and fraud in its presentation to the nation as a genuine document.

The evidence that the word has been reaching Americans comes in the latest WND/Wenzel Poll conducted exclusively for WND by the public-opinion research and media consulting company Wenzel Strategies.

It indicates that almost 40 percent of registered voters now think the nation is facing a constitutional crisis because of a lack of documentation regarding Obama’s eligibility.

NOTE: In case you missed the news conference of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse,” you can view it here.

The scientific telephone survey, conducted March 10-13, has a margin of error of 3.72 percentage points.

Nearly 26 percent of respondents say they strongly agree with the statement that the country now is facing a constitutional crisis on the issue of  Obama’s eligibility. Another 13.7 percent say they somewhat agree.

Critics long have raised the question about the impact on the nation should Obama be proven to be ineligible. There would be many issues to consider: Are the laws he’s signed still laws? What about the money he’s spent? And how about the commitments he’s made to allies overseas? What about significant social changes he’s brought about, such as opening the U.S. military to open homosexuality?

Could any of those be reversed. And who would pay for that?

Or does anybody care?

The preliminary findings of Arpaio’s investigation by experienced law enforcement investigators and attorneys, released March 1, have served to wake people up on the issue, Wenzel said, despite mainstream media efforts to keep the information under wraps.

The poll showed 11 percent of voters are very familiar with the conclusions in Arpaio’s report, and another 19 percent are somewhat familiar. Still, nearly 70 percent were not very or not at all familiar.

The poll also showed that because of Arpaio’s report, 40 percent now concede they are more likely to believe Obama in ineligible to hold the office of president. Another 20 percent said they weren’t able to express an opinion on that question.

Also, more than 46 percent said they agree that now there needs to be more extensive investigative work done into Obama’s eligibility to determine the facts, while 39 percent said they disagreed.

And then there was the key question about the nation facing a constitutional crisis.

At issue would be consequences such as the fallout of court decisions made by judges appointed by Obama. There are two new U.S. Supreme Court judges, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, who owe their lifelong appointments to Obama.

But if Obama was ineligible from the beginning, what about those appointments, and what about the decisions in which those judges have participated?

Respondents also are divided over the little media coverage that did take place. About 30 percent say the coverage of the Arpaio report was favorable to Obama and another 25 percent say it opposed him. Significantly, 30 percent are “not sure.”

Wenzel suggested that the issue needs to be in the news, so people know about it, can do their research and make up their minds.

“This issue is very much like the government takeover of the national health care system engineered in the first two years of the Obama term in that it produces a visceral and negative reaction from many voters, but it requires constant discussion to keep it in the minds of voters. This is not a subject on which voters want to dwell, but forced to think about it, many react in a negative way,” Wenzel said.

“This may be the very reason Obama’s supporters in the mainstream media do not want this topic discussed, and there has been a concerted effort to marginalize those who raise questions about this issue,” he said.

“But the truth is that if Americans came to realize just how many of their neighbors harbor the same skepticism about Obama’s eligibility that they share, the political and societal ramifications could bring dramatic change to this nation,” he said.

He said Americans so far mostly have been content to “sit idly by while an apparent imposter raids their national treasury and runs their once-great nation into the ground.”

The issue is Obama has not provided the documentation needed to determine whether he meets the Constitution’s requirement that a president be a “natural-born citizen.”

Obama has refused to allow access to whatever original documentation there might be in the state of Hawaii, where he said he was born, as well as many other documents, such as passport records, kindergarten records, Punahou school records, Occidental College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis, Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, University of Chicago articles, Illinois State Bar Association records, Illinois State Senate records and schedules, medical records, Obama/Dunham marriage license, Obama/Dunham divorce documents, Soetoro/Dunham marriage license and adoption records.

There also are his critics who say that “natural born citizen” at the time the Constitution was written would have meant the offspring of two citizens of the country, and since Obama’s father was a foreign national, he would not qualify under that standard.

WND previously reported that some of the silence from the media may be due to threats.

Lead Cold Case Posse investigator Mike Zullo told WND, “During our investigation, we actually were told [that media] had been threatened with FTC investigations. Commentators [had been] threatened with their jobs.”

The threats were so intimidating that some individuals quit their positions over safety concerns for their families, he said.

Read the results of Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse investigation.

See detailed results of survey questions:

Sheriff Arpaio’s report found that there is probable cause to believe Barack Obama is NOT eligible to serve as president, and that the birth certificate he released last year was a forgery. Based on this information, and whatever else you have heard about this investigation, were you more or less likely to believe that Obama is eligible to hold the office of the presidency?

Based on what you have learned from the Arpaio report, do you agree or disagree that there is a need for more extensive investigation into Obama’s eligibility to be president?

Based on the Arpaio report, do you agree or disagree that the country now faces a constitutional crisis regarding this issue?

Thinking about how the media has covered the release of this new report, do you agree or disagree that the story was reported appropriately, fairly and objectively, do you think that most of the news coverage was slanted in favor of Obama, or do you think that coverage was slanted against Obama?

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Read the preliminary results of Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse investigation.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/poll-u-s-faces-constitutional-crisis-on-obama/print/