Ballot buffoonery in Arizona

If one-fiftieth of 1 percent of Arizonans demanded that Ken Bennett, the state’s Republican secretary of state, go to work in the nude, would he comply? Not likely. After all, Bennett, the former Republican president of the Arizona Senate, is planning to run for governor in two years. It wouldn’t pay to pander to crackpots — and humiliate himself in the bargain. Or would it?

The question arises because Bennett, allegedly in response to emailed requests from 1,200 Arizonans, demanded Hawaii provide him with verification of President Obama’s birth certificate. If he doesn’t get it, he says, he might strike the president’s name from the state’s ballot this fall.

Never mind that Hawaii has confirmed publicly and repeatedly, since before the 2008 presidential election, that Obama was born there; that the Hawaii Department of Health has released both the short and long forms of the president’s birth certificate; and that all this information, along with clear-as-a-bell explanations, is available to the public online. Bennett insists that none of that is sufficient proof for the Show Me Your Papers State.

Bennett hastens to add that he is no birther. Of course he isn’t: Everyone knows that birthers — the few that remain against the overwhelming facts of documentary evidence — are half-baked clowns who live for their pet conspiracy theory. He is simply throwing a bone to the birthers, who in most states constitute a laughable fringe of the Republican Party.

By threatening to exclude Obama from the ballot, Bennett transformed what should have been a farcical sideshow of the 2012 election into an actual menace to democracy. He legitimized the lunatic leanings of the United States’, and his party’s, most extreme elements.

In the process, he shamed Arizona on the 100th anniversary of its statehood, giving it the appearance of a banana republic that’s come unhinged under the influence of partisan fever.