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Eighteen percent said Obama was Jewish?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/opinion/sunday/bruni-america-the-clueless.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
America the Clueless
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: May 11, 2013
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That we Americans are out to lunch isnt news. But every once in a while a fresh factoid like the Obamacare ignorance comes along to remind us that were out to breakfast and dinner as well. And it adds an important, infrequently acknowledged bit of perspective to all the commentary, from us journalists and from political strategists alike, about how voters behave and whom they reward. We purport to interpret an informed, rational universe, because wed undercut our own insights if we purported anything else.
But only limited sense can be made of what is often nonsensical, and the truth is that a great big chunk of the electorate is tuned out, zonked out or combing Roswell for alien remains. Polls over the last few years have variously shown that about 30 percent of us couldnt name the vice president, about 35 percent couldnt assign the proper century to the American Revolution and 6 percent couldnt circle Independence Day on a calendar. Im supposing that the 6 percent werent also given the holidays synonym, the Fourth of July. Im an optimist through and through.
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At a heated point of the 2012 presidential primaries, when both Rick Santorum and the news media were making much of his faith and fecundity, less than 30 percent of voters could identify his religious affiliation as Catholic, according to one poll. Months later a different poll asked voters about President Obamas religious affiliation, persistently mistaken by some Americans to be Muslim. The good news? The share of voters making the Muslim error had dropped, to 10 percent. The weird news? Eighteen percent said Obama was Jewish.
Its possible, of course, that respondents just mess with pollsters heads. Hes a Seventh-day Adventist! Hes a Scientologist! But too many surveys over too many years show too much abject ignorance for the phenomenon to be belittled or dismissed. Whats more, theres no consoling arc over time, no trajectory of progress. Wherever the Internet is speeding us, its not toward greater civic erudition and enlightenment.
Into the vacuum of substantive knowledge rush the unprincipled advertisements, the unctuous hucksters, the super PACs, the Swift boating, the Sunday-morning-talk-show spin. A clueless electorate is a corruptible one, and one that seems ill poised to make the smartest, best call about something as sweeping as Obamacare and how it gets tweaked or not down the line. Maybe well blink our way to the right decisions. Or maybe well just stumble around with our eyes closed.