Clinton and Trump Both Have Contempt for the American Voter

Then Trump did something that must drive Clinton supporters stark raving mad. He twisted the storyline to make it seem as if he had, all these years, somehow been on a noble fact-finding mission to establish Obama's eligibility to be president.

"Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it," he said.

The whole assertion is so preposterous that you have to wonder: Just how low is Trump's opinion of the American voter?

About as low as Clinton's. It's a mystery why the Democratic nominee insists on bringing up an issue on which -- as MSNBC's Joe Scarborough recently put it -- she and some of her former and current advisers don't exactly have "clean hands."

Trump is right about one thing. It's indisputable that the roots of the birther issue go back to Clinton's failed 2008 bid for the presidency.

The media have tried to help Clinton whitewash that history by crafting a narrative that, while it might be true that some Democrats trafficked in ugly rumors about Obama being born in Kenya, this only happened after Obama had already won the nomination and the only people engaged in such mischief were low-level volunteers.

That part is not true. It was Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn who, in a March 2007 memo to Clinton, suggested that Obama's "roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited" and insisted that Obama was not "fundamentally American in his thinking and his values." And now a journalist named James Asher, formerly the Washington bureau chief of the McClatchy newspaper chain, says that the line that Obama was born in Kenya was pushed to him in person by longtime senior Clinton confidante Sidney Blumenthal. According to Asher, Blumenthal also tried to link Obama to "controversial Muslim groups."

Blumenthal denies Asher's account. And there is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign ever acted on advice to portray Obama as foreign. But that doesn't mean the advice wasn't given.

Clinton surrogates were out there during the heat of the primary battle pushing a narrative that emphasized what CNN's Jake Tapper gingerly called Obama's "otherness," as when former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Clinton supporter, suggested during a TV interview that Obama had attended a madrassa while growing up in Indonesia.

Clinton would be wise to avoid this entire topic, before it blows up in her face. But she won't. She'll keep bringing it up.

Because, just like her opponent, she has no respect for the intelligence of the American voter.

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.