Obama Talks Birthers on 'Oprah'

The topic must have been unavoidable. On the same day he made his birth certificate available, President Obama sat down with Oprah Winfrey and talked about what led him to make the surprise move. "I said to my team, look, even though this is not usually what the state of Hawaii does, let's ask them for a special dispensation where they will go ahead and provide us with the original to see if we can put this to rest." When Winfrey asked what he had thought of the conspiracy theories, Obama cheekily replied, “Can I just say I was there, so I knew. I knew I had been born. I remembered it.” Politico says, meanwhile, that Obama's decision to release his birth certificate was a personal one: " He just wanted to shut this down so he didn’t have to deal with this anymore," a source says. Another White House official says, "Allowing the GOP primary to devolve into birther mania probably would be better, but the president felt strongly that this was bad for the country.”