On Morning Joe today, Mika Brzezinski asked Tim Pawlenty to assess the strength of one of his potential rivals, Donald Trump, and the former Minnesota governor tried at first to remain positive, calling Trump “talented” and “interesting.” When it came time to assess Trump’s apparent platform of birth certificates, Pawlenty was decidedly less positive:

Tim Pawlenty says Donald Trump needs to get off the birther circuit.

In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the former Minnesota governor said there are more serious concerns to weigh.

“I, for one, do not believe we should be raising that issue,” Pawlenty said. “I think President Obama was born in the United States.”

Whatever momentary interest there was in this subject should have been abandoned long ago, preferably when Obama released the certification of his birth from Hawaii, or when the contemporaneous birth announcements were discovered by Hillary Clinton’s oppo researchers, or when the state of Hawaii twice declared the certification accurate.  The same is true for the cottage industry that has surfaced over whether Obama had a ghost writer for his memoirs. Those kind of questions might arguably have resonated when Obama was an unknown, but clearly they didn’t.  Voters chose Obama anyway in 2008, and those “strategies” are far less likely to succeed four years later.

Obama’s two-plus years in office provide plenty of reasons to oppose a second term.  Serious candidates should be focused on serious issues.  Trump is obviously not serious, but is doing a near-parody in an attempt to grab as much of the limelight as possible.