In his 29 June 2010 NY Times blog post, Ross Douthat writes, “Birthers,’ Polls and Public Ignorance.” Here are a few items that Douthat thinks should be taken with a grain of salt:

• There’s a new poll out, from Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes, showing that 24 percent of Americans don’t think that Barack Obama was born in the United States. [62 percent of Americans think Obama was born here, while 24 percent think he was not and 14 percent are unsure.]
• 6 percent of poll respondents think that Hawaii is not part of the country and 4 percent are unsure.
• 31 percent of the country couldn’t identify Dick Cheney as the vice president in 2007.
• Harris [pollsters] has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps.

Douthat says,

This is an entirely typical result: Large percentages of Americans, poll after poll suggests, don’t know what seem like basic facts about their country and the world. … [I]gnorance about public affairs cuts across party lines. And it isn’t even necessarily a devastating indictment of American culture. … [It] suggests a certain ignorance about important national issues, but also, perhaps, a healthy detachment from politics and public affairs, and a salutary focus on the private sphere instead.

He also says,

I don’t think that people who tell pollsters that Obama was born outside the United States are necessarily “dense.” Some of them are quite intelligent: Conspiracy theories are generally the province of people who are high on I.Q. and low on common sense.

-RichardH