WILL WAKE’S HIGH POVERTY SCHOOLS HURT HOME PROPERTY VALUES

By Cash Michaels

editor

EDITOR - This is part 6 of a multi-part look at Walnut Creek Elementary School, and the other high poverty schools that the conservative-led Wake County School Board will be creating in Southeast Raleigh as it moves forward with its controversial neighborhood schools policy. Studies consistently show black and Hispanic students are relegated to poor instruction, a lack of resources and a second-rate education in high poverty, racially identifiable schools. The property values in neighborhoods with high poverty schools also suffer, as families move away.

            The Carolinian examines the question, “Will all or any of this happen in Wake County?”

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            When Corey A. Moore, the new principal of Walnut Creek Elementary School, formally opens the $25 million high poverty school in Southeast Raleigh this August, he’ll be responsible for a lot, the least of which is how to successfully lead a school where over 80 percent of its 700-plus students are on free-and-reduced lunch, and over 50 percent are officially considered “low-performing.”

            “I believe that my experiences and past have prepared me for this opportunity, and I’m standing prepared to lead in a direction that will take this school straight up,” Moore assured supporters in March after he was appointed.

            Indeed, regardless of how stacked a deck Moore’s challenge will be - a challenge created by the Republican-led Wake School Board to establish the first manifestation of their controversial neighborhood schools policy - its even steeper than he realizes.

            As goes the school, so may go the neighborhood.

            Across the street and down the road from the new high poverty challenge on Sunnybrook Road off of Rock Quarry Road, is the Quarry Pointe subdivision.

            With an average selling price of $144,410 per single-family unit, the clean, attractive, relatively new middle-class housing development where, according to city-data.com, the median income is $46,185; 69 percent of the homeowners are married couples that are both working; and over 25 percent of families there have children, 3 years-old and above, who are enrolled school K-12, the last thing this young community needs is anything that would drive down its collective property values.

            The bad economy is already having a staggering effect on home prices, though the Raleigh-Cary housing market was ranked Number One in Builder Magazine’s “Healthiest Markets for 2011” rankings last month.

            But experts say a bad school could definitely sprout “For Sale” signs in the immediate neighborhood.

            District 4 Wake School Board member Keith Sutton, Walnut Creek Elementary Principal Corey Moore, and others committed to the high poverty school’s success are working hard to prevent that, but at best, they’re running hard to catch up. Rarely does a new school open with the strikes against it that Walnut Creek has. If it can’t immediately show significant improvement in academic achievement, regardless of the student body’s high poverty level, experts say the school's reputation will begin to hurt surrounding housing values.

            It’s something Quarry Pointe residents may have to watch, and a concern that has already been raised at a recent Wake School Board meeting two weeks ago.

            “In many other cities in the US, real estate agents will discourage you from buying [a home] in certain areas, due to the poor quality of schools in the area,” Stephanie Enders, a parent speaking during the public comment period, told the school board, noting that because of Wake’s previously successful socioeconomic student diversity policy, “...you have the ability to live anywhere in the county, and know that your child is going to get a good, solid public education.”

            Wake’s experience bears Enders out. 

It was the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and local realty association that backed the Wake school system's move to socioeconomic diversity a decade ago in a drive to attract more businesses, and families, to the area from across the country. The resulting academic achievement resulted in Wake being rated one of the top public school systems in the nation by Forbes Magazine, among others, with thousands of families buying homes in the area.

So it was no accident that those same concerns - namely the Raleigh Chamber and local realtors - were sweating bullets after the Republican-led Wake School Board began changing to neighborhood schools as a policy. The disruption forced the chamber to immediately find a compromise student assignment plan to submit - one that emphasized controlled parental choice - in order to placate the business and realty communities.

A final student assignment plan is expected by the end of spring, and realtors hope it's one that allows them to comfortably sell the school system as an asset again, especially after all of the negative national press it has received.

            Warning that the proven byproduct of a neighborhood schools policy, “…are great divides of highly desirable and undesirable areas,” Ms. Enders, in her remarks to the Wake school board, added,  “For the most part, Wake County doesn’t suffer this condition.”           

            But Charlotte does.

            Mary Lou Knox is a longtime realtor of 27 years in Mecklenburg County, where the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public School System (CMS) has poured so much money into its plethora of failing high poverty schools, that it now has to close ten schools, and for the third year in a row, has to layoff as many as 1500 school employees, which could include 600 teachers.

            Last fall, Great Schools in Wake Coalition, a nonprofit diversity advocacy group, and The Carolinian, traveled to Charlotte to interview educators, parents and school officials about hat problems Wake Public Schools can expect based on the CMS experience. The project was for an online YouTube video titled, “Costs and Consequences: What’s at Stake for Wake.”

            Ms. Knox, the realtor, said that as Wake creates more high poverty schools through its neighborhood schools policy, it can expect to have a dramatic impact on the housing markets surrounding those schools.

            “I have watched and seen how the different school assignments have affected our neighborhood and the neighborhoods in Charlotte,” Knox said.

            As in Wake, many who moved to Charlotte-Mecklenburg bought their homes in particular neighborhoods because of the good reputation of school that serviced their area.

            “Now when I speak with people about an area, school is a factor that is detrimental to the area,” Knox says. People in Charlotte can now go online to the CMS website and research which schools are rated low performing and have high F&R student populations.

            “When parents come to me and have given me the criteria [for a new home], they’ve already looked at test scores of elementary schools, and they tell me they want to be in one area, and do not want to be in another,” said Knox. “Sometimes they’re adamant that they want to be at one particular school. So I must look, and make that the particular criteria that I must search for them.”

            They immediately cross those schools, and those neighborhoods where they considered purchasing a home, off their lists.

Even if it means paying more than they originally planned for a home.
            “”They won’t even consider it, now,” Knox said, making it clear that depending on CMS student assignment policies, neighborhoods can decline, or prices for homes in higher income communities, can “accelerate.”

            The result in many cases, Knox says, has been panic buying, and selling in the neighborhoods. Many of the sellers really didn’t want to move, but because of a CMS student assignment decision affecting their area, felt they had no choice, Knox said.

            Depending on how CMS school boundary lines are drawn, two high schools in the same subdivision can be radically affected, said Knox, causing one to be high poverty, and the other upper-income.

            The result - homes near the high poverty school are much harder to sell than near the upper-income.

            Knox indicated that because of this, some realtors won’t put low-performing schools in the MLS (Multiple Listing System) for fear that it will lower the number of home showings they have in that neighborhood.

            The Carolinian tried to get comment from realtors in Wake County on this issue, but none returned calls by press time.

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"WE DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS KIND OF SILLINESS!"

                                                THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

_______________________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release                                 April 27, 2011

TRANSCRIPT: REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT

James S. Brady Press Briefing Room

9:48 A.M. PDT

     THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, everybody.  Now, let me just comment, first of all, on the fact that I can't get the networks to break in on all kinds of other discussions -- (laughter.)  I was just back there listening to Chuck -- he was saying, it’s amazing that he’s not going to be talking about national security.  I would not have the networks breaking in if I was talking about that, Chuck, and you know it.

     Q    Wrong channel.  (Laughter.) 

     THE PRESIDENT:  As many of you have been briefed, we provided additional information today about the site of my birth. Now, this issue has been going on for two, two and a half years now.  I think it started during the campaign.  And I have to say that over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement, I've been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going.  We've had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital.

     We've posted the certification that is given by the state of Hawaii on the Internet for everybody to see.  People have provided affidavits that they, in fact, have seen this birth certificate.  And yet this thing just keeps on going. 

     Now, normally I would not comment on something like this, because obviously there’s a lot of stuff swirling in the press on at any given day and I've got other things to do.  But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we're going to have to make as a nation.  It was about my birth certificate.  And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here.

     And so I just want to make a larger point here.  We've got some enormous challenges out there.  There are a lot of folks out there who are still looking for work.  Everybody is still suffering under high gas prices.  We're going to have to make a series of very difficult decisions about how we invest in our future but also get a hold of our deficit and our debt -- how do we do that in a balanced way.

     And this is going to generate huge and serious debates, important debates.  And there are going to be some fierce disagreements -- and that’s good.  That’s how democracy is supposed to work.  And I am confident that the American people and America’s political leaders can come together in a bipartisan way and solve these problems.  We always have. 

     But we’re not going to be able to do it if we are distracted.  We’re not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other.  We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts.  We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.

     We live in a serious time right now and we have the potential to deal with the issues that we confront in a way that will make our kids and our grandkids and our great grandkids proud.  And I have every confidence that America in the 21st century is going to be able to come out on top just like we always have.  But we’re going to have to get serious to do it. 

I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.  But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press.  We do not have time for this kind of silliness.  We’ve got better stuff to do.  I’ve got better stuff to do.  We’ve got big problems to solve.  And I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them -- not on this.

Thanks very much, everybody.

                        END           9:54 A.M. EDT

-----

Pfeiffer Post: President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate

WASHINGTON – Today, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer posted the following on www.whitehouse.gov/blog. The post is below and available HERE.

President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate

Posted by Dan Pfeiffer on April 27, 2011 at 08:57 AM EDT

In 2008, in response to media inquiries, the President’s campaign requested his birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. The state sent the campaign the President’s birth certificate, the same legal documentation provided to all Hawaiians as proof of birth in state, and the campaign immediately posted it on the internet. That birth certificate can be seen here (PDF).

When any citizen born in Hawaii requests their birth certificate, they receive exactly what the President received. In fact, the document posted on the campaign website is what Hawaiians use to get a driver’s license from the state and the document recognized by the Federal Government and the courts for all legal purposes. That’s because it is the birth certificate. This is not and should not be an open question.

The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting. President Barack Obama's long form birth certificate can be seen here (PDF).  Correspondence with the Hawaii State Department of Health can be seen here (PDF).

At a time of great consequence for this country – when we should be debating how we win the future, reduce our deficit, deal with high gas prices, and bring stability to the Middle East, Washington, DC, was once again distracted by a fake issue.  The President’s hope is that with this step, we can move on to debating the bigger issues that matter to the American people and the future of the country.

Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director

---

TRANSCRIPT FROM BACKGROUND BRIEFING:

PRESS GAGGLE

BY PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY,

DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS DAN PFEIFFER,

AND WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL BOB BAUER

James S. Brady Press Briefing Room

8:48 A.M. EDT

     MR. CARNEY:  Good morning, everybody.  You can read the paperwork we just handed out in a minute.  Let me just get started.  Thank you for coming this morning.  I have with me today Dan Pfeiffer, the President’s Director of Communications, as well as Bob Bauer, the President’s White House Counsel, who will have a few things to say about the documents we handed to you today.  And then we'll take your questions.  I remind you this is off camera and only pen and pad, not for audio.  And I give you Dan Pfeiffer. 

     MR. PFEIFFER:  Thanks, Jay.  What you have in front of you now is a packet of papers that includes the President’s long-form birth certificate from the state of Hawaii, the original birth certificate that the President requested and we posted online in 2008, and then the correspondence between the President’s counsel and the Hawaii State Department of Health that led to the release of those documents.

     If you would just give me a minute to -- indulge me a second to walk through a little of the history here, since all of you weren't around in 2008 when we originally released the President’s birth certificate, I will do that.  And then Bob Bauer will walk through the timeline of how we acquired these documents.

     In 2008, in response to media inquiries, the President’s campaign requested his birth certificate from the state of Hawaii.  We received that document; we posted it on the website. That document was then inspected by independent fact checkers, who came to the campaign headquarters and inspected the document -- independent fact checkers did, and declared that it was proof positive that the President was born in Hawaii.

     To be clear, the document we presented on the President’s website in 2008 is his birth certificate.  It is the piece of paper that every Hawaiian receives when they contact the state to request a birth certificate.  It is the birth certificate they take to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get their driver’s license and that they take to the federal government to get their passport.  It is the legally recognized document.

     That essentially -- for those of you who followed the campaign closely know that solved the issue.  We didn’t spend any time talking about this after that.  There may have been some very fringe discussion out there, but as a campaign issue it was settled and it was --

     Q    When you posted this did you post the other side of it where the signature is?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  Yes. 

     Q    Because it is not here and that's been an issue.

     MR. PFEIFFER:  We posted both sides and when it was looked at it was looked at by -- the fact checkers came to headquarters and actually examined the document we had. 

     That settled the issue.  In recent weeks, the issue has risen again as some folks have begun raising a question about the original -- about the long-form birth certificate you now have in front of you.  And Bob will explain why -- the extraordinary steps we had to take to receive that and the legal restraints that are in place there. 

     But it became an issue again.  And it went to -- essentially the discussion transcended from the nether regions of the Internet into mainstream political debate in this country.  It became something that when both Republicans and Democrats were talking to the media they were asked about.  It was a constant discussion on mainstream news organizations.  And the President believed that it was becoming a distraction from the major issues we're having in this country. 

And he was particularly struck by the fact that right after the Republicans released their budget framework and the President released his, we were prepared to have a very important, very vigorous debate in this country about the future of the country, the direction we’re going to take, how we’re doing to deal with very important issues like education, Medicare, how we’re going to deal with taxes in this country.  And that should -- that’s the debate we should be having yet.

     What was really dominating a lot of discussion was this fake controversy, essentially, a sideshow, that was distracting from this real issue.  And an example of that would be when major Democrats and Republicans went onto mainstream news organizations to talk about their budget plans -- including the President -- they were asked about this.  They were asked about what they thought about the controversy.  They were asked if they believed the President was born in the United States.  And it was really a distraction. 

That really struck the President, led him to ask his counsel to look into whether we could ask the state of Hawaii to release the long-form certificate, which is not something they generally do.  And he did that despite the fact that it probably was not in his long-term -- it would have been in his -- probably in his long-term political interests to allow this birther debate to dominate discussion in the Republican Party for months to come.  But he thought even though it might have been good politics, he thought it was bad for the country.  And so he asked counsel to look into this.

And now I’ll have Bob explain that, and then we’ll take your questions.

MR. CARNEY:  I just want to -- sorry, I meant to mention at the top, as some of you may have seen, the President will be coming to the briefing room at 9:45 a.m., making a brief statement about this -- not taking questions, but just wanted to let you know.

MR. PFEIFFER:  And he will use this as an opportunity to make a larger point about what this debate says about our politics.

     Go ahead, Bob.

     MR. BAUER:  Early last week the decision was made to review the legal basis for seeking a waiver from the longstanding prohibition in the state Department of Health on releasing the long-form birth certificate.  And so we undertook a legal analysis and determined a waiver request could be made that we had the grounds upon which to make that request. 

And by Thursday of last week, I spoke to private counsel to the President and asked her to contact the State Department of Health and to have a conversation about any requirements, further requirements, that they thought we had to satisfy to lodge that waiver request.  She had that conversation with the state Department of Health on Thursday -- counsel in question is Judy Corley at the law firm of Perkins Coie, and you have a copy of the letter she subsequently sent to the department with the President’s written request.

The department outlined the requirements for the President to make this request.  He signed a letter making that request on Friday afternoon upon returning from the West Coast.  And private counsel forwarded his written request -- written, signed request -- along with a letter from counsel, to the state Department of Health on Friday.

The department, as I understood it, after reviewing the law and reviewing the grounds asserted in the request, came to the conclusion that a waiver could be appropriately granted.  We were advised that the long-form birth certificate could be copied and made available to us as early as Monday, April 25th -- the day before yesterday.  And we made arrangements for counsel to travel to Honolulu to pick it up and it was returned to the White House yesterday afternoon.

     Let me emphasize again, there is a specific statute that governs access to and inspection of vital records in the state of Hawaii.  The birth certificate that we posted online is, in fact, and always has been, and remains, the legal birth certificate of the President that would be used for all legal purposes that any resident of Hawaii would want to use a birth certificate for. 

However, there is legal authority in the department to make exceptions to the general policy on not releasing the long-form birth certificate.  The policy in question, by the way, on non-release has been in effect since the mid-1980s, I understand.  So while I cannot tell you what the entire history of exceptions has been, it is a limited one.  This is one of very few that I understand have been granted for the reasons set out in private counsel’s letter.

     MR. PFEIFFER:  We'll be happy to take some questions.

     Q    I guess I just want to make sure that we’re clear on this.  Even though this one says “certificate of live birth” on here, this is different than the other certificate of live birth that we’ve seen?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  Yes.  The second page there is the one that was posted on the Internet. 

     Q    Okay.

     MR. PFEIFFER:  And that is a copy of the one that has been kept at the Hawaii Department of Health.

     Q    Okay.  And this is the one that would be referred to -- that people have been asking for that is the birth certificate?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  They are both -- the second one is the birth certificate.  The one on the top is what is referred to as the long-form birth certificate.  As you can see -- and Bob can walk you through it -- it contains some additional information that is not on the second page, which was the birth certificate which was released during the campaign.

     If you could just explain the difference.

     MR. BAUER:  There’s a difference between a certificate and a certification.  The certification is simply a verification of certain information that’s in the original birth certificate.  The birth certificate, as you can see, has signatures at the bottom from the attending physician, the local registrar, who essentially oversees the maintenance of the records.  It contains some additional information also -- that is to say, the original birth certificate -- it contains some additional information like the ages of the parents, birthplaces, residence, street address, the name of the hospital. 

The core information that’s required for legal purposes and that is put into the actual certification that’s a computer-generated document, which we posted in 2008, that information is abstracted, if you will, from the original birth certificate, put into the computerized short-form certification, and made available to Hawaiian residents at their request.

So the long form, which is a certificate, has more information, but the short form has the information that’s legally sufficient for all the relevant purposes.

Q    This first one has never been released publicly, correct?

MR. BAUER:  That’s correct.  It is in a bound volume in the records at the state Department of Health in Hawaii.

Q    Bob, can you explain why President Obama let this drag on for four years?  Was it Donald Trump that prompted you to issue this?

MR. BAUER:  I’ll let Dan --

MR. PFEIFFER:  Sure. 

Q    I know you expected that question, right?  (Laughter.) 

MR. PFEIFFER:  He even said you would be the one who would ask it.  (Laughter.) 

I don’t think this dragged on for four years because this was a resolved -- for those of you who remember the campaign, this issue was resolved in 2008.  And it has not been an issue, none of you have asked about it, called about it, reported on it until the last few weeks. 

And as I said earlier, it probably would have been -- a lot of the pundits out there have talked about the fact that this whole birther debate has been really bad for the Republican Party and would probably be good for the President politically.  But despite that, the President, as I said, was struck by how this was crowding out the debate, particularly around the budget, on important issues, and was an example of the sort of sideshows that our politics focuses on instead of the real challenges that we have to confront as a country.

And so that’s why he made this decision now, because it became an issue that transcended sort of this -- it essentially was something that was talked about, as I said, from the nether regions of the Internet onto mainstream network newscasts.  In fact, Jay has been asked about this just yesterday in this room.

Q    So I guess the implication is that you did get political advantage by having not released this until today, over the course of the last four years?

MR. PFEIFFER:  There has been -- no one that I can recall actually asked us to -- we were asked to release the President’s birth certificate in 2008.  We did that.  And then no one -- it never -- up until a few weeks ago, there was never an issue about that that wasn’t the birth certificate from any credible individual or media outlet.  And it hasn’t been until -- I mean, Jay was asked about this yesterday --

Q    When you say that, you mean certification -- you released the certification?

MR. PFEIFFER:  When any Hawaiian wants -- requests their birth certificate because they want to get a driver’s license, they want to get a passport, they do exactly what the President did in 2008.  And that’s what that is.  And we released that.  And that’s what any Hawaiian would do to release their birth certificate.  And that was good enough for everyone until very recently this became a question again.  And so the President made this decision.  He’ll talk to you more about his thinking on that.

Q    And this is going to sound -- I mean, you can just anticipate what people are going to -- remain unconvinced.  They’re going to say that this is just a photocopy of a piece of paper, you could have typed anything in there.  Will the actual certificate be on display or viewable at any -- (laughter.)

Q    Will the President be holding it?

MR. PFEIFFER:  He will not, and I will not leave it here for him to do so.  But it will -- the State Department of Health in Hawaii will obviously attest that that is a -- what they have on file.  As Bob said, it’s in a book in Hawaii.

MR. BAUER:  And you’ll see the letter from the director of the Health Department that states that she oversaw the copy and is attesting to --

     Q    But do you understand that this could quiet the conspiracy theorists?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  There will always be some selection of people who will believe something, and that's not the issue.  The issue is that this is not a discussion that is just happening among conspiracy theorists.  It’s happening here in this room; it’s happening on all of the networks.  And it’s something that, as I said, every major political figure of both parties who’s actually out trying to talk about real issues is asked about this by the media.  And so the President decided to release this.  And I'll leave it to others to decide whether there’s still -- there will be some who still have a different -- have a conspiracy about this.

     Q    You’ve got two certified copies, according to this study.  You have these physical --

     MR. PFEIFFER:  Yes.  I showed you one.  Just one.

     Q    You showed us a photocopy of one.

     MR. PFEIFFER:  No, I showed you --

     Q    Does that have a stamp?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  It has a seal on it.

     Q    Why does this rise to the level of a presidential statement?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  The President -- this in itself -- when you hear the President I think you’ll understand the point he’s making.  That will be in not too long.

     Q    Did the President change his own mind about this?  In other words, was he advocating during the campaign let’s just put it out there and get it over with, or was this an internal shift in thinking based -- in other words, was it the President who steadfastly during the campaign said this is ridiculous, I don't want to give this any more ground, and has now changed his mind? Or is this the --

     MR. PFEIFFER:  Let’s be very clear.  You were there for the campaign.  There was never a question about the original birth certificate during the campaign.  It was a settled issue.  I was there for the original decision to release the birth certificate. I was there when we posted it online.  I'm not sure I even knew there was an original one that was different than the one we posted online because it wasn’t an issue.  So it wasn’t like -- let’s be very clear.  We were asked for the President’s birth certificate in 2008; we released the President’s birth certificate; and it was done.  That was it.

     And so there hasn’t been a discussion about this other document for years.  It’s only been in the last few weeks.  And so to your second question, the President decided to do this and he'll talk about this when he gets here -- decided to do it at the timeline that Bob laid out because it was a -- this was a sideshow that was distracting from the real challenges that we're facing.

     It’s not just a sideshow for him; it’s a sideshow for our entire politics that have become focused on this.

     Q    Not to give Donald Trump more publicity than he has, but is he the person who sort of -- sort of that bridge between what you're calling a fringe and the mainstream?  Do you think that he’s the reason why this tripped the switch to a level where you now have to deal with something you thought was dealt with?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  It’s not for me to say why mainstream media organizations began to cover this debate.  They’ll have to answer that for themselves. 

     Q    How concerned were you about running against Donald Trump in a general election? 

     MR. PFEIFFER:  I'd refer any questions on the election to the campaign.

     Q    Can you address the reports of Petraeus to the CIA and DOD --

     MR. PFEIFFER:  You get points for that, Carol.  (Laughter.) 

     MR. CARNEY:  Yes.  I don't have -- but you’ll be disappointed to learn that I don't have a personnel announcement for you.  The President will be addressing this -- questions about personnel tomorrow. 

     Q    Dan, was there a debate about whether or not this deserved being discussed by the White House, whether or not -- and I'm going back to the birth certificate.  I lose points, I understand.  But was there debate about whether or not this was worthy of the White House?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  The point I'd make is that we weren't the ones who -- we're not the first ones to bring this up in this room.  Jay has been asked questions about this; the President has been asked about it in media interviews.  And so that wasn’t a decision that we made, and the President made the decision to do this and he made the decision to -- and when he comes down here this morning he'll talk to you about why he thinks there’s an important point to be made here.

     Q    Getting back to the personnel announcements, does the President understand that these announcements have been made and sourced satisfactorily for most news organizations before he speaks up and he’s not letting his White House corroborate?

     MR. CARNEY:  I don't have a comment on that for you, Bill.  (Laughter.) 

     Q    I mean, this is such BS.  It’s all out there and you guys are -- okay, the President is going to talk about this tomorrow so we can't say anything.

     MR. CARNEY:  Bill, you're free to make phone calls everywhere you can.  I'm just saying that we don't have a personnel announcement for you today. 

     Q    And he'll tomorrow, he'll cover all the aforementioned switches?

     MR. CARNEY:  We'll have a personnel announcement tomorrow.

     Q    Jay, yesterday you talked about failsafe triggers as sort of a positive alternative to spending cuts.  I'm wondering if the White House has any openness to including that, because it’s a White House proposal, including that in any legislation that would raise the debt ceiling limit.

     MR. CARNEY:  Well, what we've said very clearly, and I think Secretary Geithner said it eloquently yesterday, it is a dangerous, risky idea to hold hostage any other -- hold hostage, rather, raising the debt ceiling, a vote on raising the debt ceiling, to any other piece of legislation.  The commitment this President has to moving aggressively towards a comprehensive deficit reduction plan is clear.  It will be clear again when the Vice President convenes a meeting, bipartisan, bicameral meeting, next week.  And he hopes that progress will be made on that very quickly.

     In terms of negotiating what that would look like, I think the negotiators should do that, led by the Vice President, Republicans and Democrats together.  But again, explicitly linking or holding hostage the absolute necessity of raising the debt ceiling to any other piece of legislation and declaring that we'll tank the U.S. economy and perhaps the global economy if we don't get this specific thing that we want, I think is a dangerous and unprecedented thing to do. 

     And we're confident, remain confident, that the leaders of both parties in Congress, as well as the President, will agree with the President, as I have said many times, that we do not have an alternative to raising the debt ceiling because, as many have said, outside observers, economists and businessmen and women, the impact of that would be calamitous at best.

     Q    So even though it’s your own proposal that you guys endorsed you don't want to see it as part of the final package?

     MR. CARNEY:  I'm not negotiating individual pieces of a package that we hope Republicans and Democrats can come together around from this podium.  But again, we believe it’s essential to -- the President believes -- that's one of the reasons why we're doing this right now -- we believe that these are big debates that need to be had.  They can be contentious, argumentative, serious, comprehensive, detailed, because they’re important; they’re all about America’s future.  And they’re about visions of this country and where we're going that need to be debated.  And this debate was being crowded out in many ways by a sideshow.

     And he looks forward to having a debate on the real issues that Americans want us to talk about -- long-term economic plans, deficit reduction, investments in the kinds of things that will help this economy grow and create jobs, dealing with our energy needs, a long-term energy plan.  These are all issues that have been sidetracked at least in the public debate by some of the issues that we're talking about this morning.

     Q    Is there a concern that more and more people were actually starting to believe its sideshow -- I mean, people have been asking about --

     MR. CARNEY:  I will let the President speak for himself, but what Dan was saying and I think is important is that the issue here is that the President feels that this was bad for the country; that it’s not healthy for our political debate, when we have so many important issues that Americans care about, that affect their lives, to be drawn into sideshows about fallacies that have been disproven with the full weight of a legal document for several years. 

     So, again, as Dan said, and a lot of political pundits have said, you could say that it would be good politics, smart politics, for the President to let this play out.  He cares more about what’s good for the country.  He wants the debate on the issues.  He wants the focus on the issues that Americans care about.

     Q    Jay, the President yesterday said that he had been talking to oil exporters about increasing output.  Who specifically has he been talking --

     MR. CARNEY:  Well, I said -- I want to clarify.  I said several times I believe from this podium when asked questions about our overall handling of the issue of high gas prices that we've had conversations with oil-producing states and allies and those conversations continue.  I don't have specific “the President spoke with this leader or other government officials spoke with others,” but those are ongoing conversations that, of course, we would be having in a situation like this. 

     Q    Do you guys have any comment on the NATO soldiers that were killed in Afghanistan and any confirmation on whether there were Americans?

     MR. CARNEY:  I don't have anything for you on that this morning.

     Q    Just quickly, back on the birth certificate, yesterday you said this was a settled issue.  So --

     MR. CARNEY:  Well, as Dan said, again, it has been a settled issue. 

     MR. PFEIFFER:  From a factual point of view, it’s absolutely a settled issue.  But the fact that it was a settled issue did not keep it from becoming a major part of the political discussion in this town for the last several weeks here.  So there’s absolutely no question that what the President released in 2008 was his birth certificate and answered that question, and many of your organizations have done excellent reporting which proved that to be the case.  But it continued; the President thought it was a sideshow and chose to take this step today for the reasons Bob laid out.

     Q    Aside from the policy distractions that was presented, did you have some concern because it was sort of reaching back into the mainstream news coverage that this could become a factor in the 2012 election with centrist voters?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  No.

     Q    Just to clarify what this document is --

     MR. PFEIFFER:  This is the -- the letter first and the two certified copies -- this is one of those.  This is the same thing you have a copy of as the first page of your packet.

     Q    How did it get here?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  As Bob said, it arrived by plane -- the President’s personal counsel went to Hawaii and brought it back and we got it last night.

     Q    Last night?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  Last night.

     Q    What time?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  Between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m.

     Q    When did you decide to do this gaggle?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  What’s that?

     Q    When was this gaggle put on -- when was this planned?

     MR. PFEIFFER:  Whatever time you received your guidance suggesting that it would be “this time tomorrow morning.”

     Q    Are these letters supposed to demonstrate the legal steps that were involved in releasing it to the White House counsel?

     MR. BAUER:  The letters that you have, the personal request from the President, along with the accompanying letter from private counsel, is merely meant to document the legal path to getting the waiver of that policy so we could get the long-form certificate.

     Q    The waiver of Hawaii state government policy?

     MR. BAUER:  Right.  The non-release of the long-form certificate, which has been in effect since the 1980s -- a natural question would have been, well, what did you do to obtain the waiver, and those letters represent the request.

     Q    Well, isn’t it true that anybody who was born in Hawaii can write this letter?  I mean, that's all there is to the waiver process?

     MR. BAUER:  No.  Let me just explain once again because I also noticed, by the way, in one report already the wrong certificate was actually posted on the website.  The certificate with the signatures at the bottom -- and that's a key difference between the short form and the long form -- the long form has signatures at the bottom from the attending physician, the local registrar, and the mother, is the original birth certificate, which sits in a bound volume in the State Department of Health.

     The short from is a computerized abstract, and that's the legal birth certificate we requested in 2008 and that Hawaiians are entitled to.  Since the mid-1980s, the State Department of Health, for administrative reasons, only provides to people who request their birth certificate the short form.  They do not provide the long form.

     So in order for us to obtain the long form, we had to have a waiver.  We had to actually determine that there was a legal basis for providing it, and then ask them to exercise their authority to provide us with the long form.  The steps required to accomplish that were a letter from the person with the direct and vital interest -- the President -- so you have a letter from the President, and then there was an accompanying letter from counsel basically formalizing the request.  So the reason we included that is that those were legal steps we took to obtain the long form by way of this waiver.

     Q    Do we have the letter from the President --

     MR. BAUER:  It’s in the packet.

     Q    And you went to Hawaii?

     MR. BAUER:  I did not go to Hawaii.  The counsel, Judy Corley, who signed the -- the President’s personal counsel at Perkins Coie, Judy Corley, whose letter -- signed letter of request is in your packet, traveled to Honolulu and picked up the birth certificate.