Romney's birther bombshell: 'No one has asked to see MY birth certificate'.

Romney's birther bombshell: 'No one has asked to see MY birth certificate'.(DM).Mitt Romney has jokingly told supporters that he has never been asked to produce his birth certificate, as President Barack Obama has, because everyone knows that he and his wife are from Michigan. There were gasps from reporters and laughs and cheers from the crowd of thousands as Romney, in an ill-judged attempt at humour, gave Democrats the opening to portray him as subscribing to the ‘Birther’ conspiracy theory that Obama is not an American.
‘No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate,’ Romney said. ‘They know that this was the place that we were born and raised.’ Romney was telling the crowd in Commerce, Michigan on Friday that he and wife Ann had been born in hospitals nearby. ‘Now I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital,’ he said. ‘I was born in Harper Hospital.'
It was then that he said that he had never been asked to show his birth certificate. The quip was an obvious reference to the theory propounded on the Right-wing fringe that Obama was not born in Hawaii, as a newspaper notice at the time and the long-form birth certificate produced by the White House show, but in Kenya. For Romney, the subject is a perilous one because many independent voters view such theories as racist and an attempt to de-legitimise America’s first black president.
Romney is more vulnerable on the issue than many other Republicans because he publicly accepted the endorsement of Donald Trump, the billionaire property mogul and reality television star, who is an outspoken proponent of Birther theories. 
In April last year, the White House released Obama’s long-form birth certificate after polls suggested that at least a quarter of Americans were unsure where he was born. During the early stages of the Republican primary campaign, Trump, who said he was weighing candidacy, gained traction in the polls by alleging Obama was not born in the U.S. Romney advisers said that his joke was unplanned. But many Obama supporters were quick to suggest that it was a dog whistle to racists and an attempt to whip up anger. Republicans were quick to say that an Obama adviser had suggested Romney was a felon and a super PAC campaign ad linked him to the death of a woman who succumbed to cancer. At best, Romney’s joke was a tactical blunder because it undermined his promise to run a substantive campaign about big issues and took the focus of the campaign away from what voters care about most – jobs and the economy. Mitt Romney was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1947 and his wife Ann in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1949. Read the full story here.