{"id":4188,"date":"2010-07-03T14:17:42","date_gmt":"2010-07-03T19:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=4188"},"modified":"2010-07-03T14:17:42","modified_gmt":"2010-07-03T19:17:42","slug":"rossdouthat-%e2%80%98birthers%e2%80%99-polls-and-public-ignorance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2010\/07\/03\/rossdouthat-%e2%80%98birthers%e2%80%99-polls-and-public-ignorance\/","title":{"rendered":"RossDouthat: &#8220;\u2018Birthers,\u2019 Polls and Public Ignorance&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In his 29 June 2010 NY Times blog post, Ross Douthat writes, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/douthat.blogs.nytimes.com\/2010\/06\/29\/birthers-polls-and-public-ignorance\/\" target=\"_blank\">Birthers,\u2019 Polls and Public Ignorance<\/a>.&#8221; Here are a few items that Douthat thinks should be taken with a grain of salt:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There\u2019s a new poll out, from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/magazine\/2010\/08\/60-minutes-poll-201008?currentPage=8\" target=\"_blank\">Vanity  Fair and 60 Minutes<\/a>, showing that 24 percent of Americans don\u2019t  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.]<\/li>\n<li>6 percent of poll respondents think that Hawaii is not part of  the country and 4 percent are unsure.<\/li>\n<li>31 percent of the country <a href=\"http:\/\/people-press.org\/report\/319\/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news-and-information-revolutions\" target=\"_blank\">couldn\u2019t  identify Dick Cheney as the vice president<\/a> in 2007.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Douthat says,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This is an entirely typical result: Large percentages of Americans, poll after poll suggests, don\u2019t know what seem like basic facts about their country and the world. &#8230; [I]gnorance about public affairs cuts across party lines. And it isn\u2019t even necessarily a devastating indictment of American culture. &#8230; [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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He also says,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I don\u2019t think that people who tell pollsters that Obama was born outside the United States are necessarily \u201cdense.\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>-RichardH<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his 29 June 2010 NY Times blog post, Ross Douthat writes, &#8220;Birthers,\u2019 Polls and Public Ignorance.&#8221; Here are a few items that Douthat thinks should be taken with a grain of salt: There\u2019s a new poll out, from Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes, showing that 24 percent of Americans don\u2019t think that Barack Obama [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4188","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-richardhsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4188"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4190,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4188\/revisions\/4190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}