The Pew Foundation's new report showing that not only do 18 percent of poll respondents believe Obama is a Muslim, but that the number is up from 11 percent in March 2009 should be both surprising and disturbing. In reality, though, it's simply the latter, and there's not exactly much upside in the fact that 47 percent of respondents in 2009 thought Obama was a Christian as compared to 34 percent today. By the way of clarification, there is no info as to whether these responses reflect a distinction between a self-identified "professing" Christian and someone perceived as an actual "practicing" Christian on the basis of how he conducts himself. This would clearly be a critical differentiation in these parts. In today's highly politicized religious climate, (or should that be religionized political climate?) anything from Obama's health care plan to his stance on abortion is sufficient to brand him an infidel in some circumstances.
Strikingly, even among Democrats, fewer than half saw Obama as a Christian either. These opinions about the President's faith do show a somewhat partisan pattern in that more than a third of conservative Republicans now believe our First Dude is getting his marching orders from Mecca, although there's not much to cheer about for the Dems in figures showing the number of Independents who see him as a Muslim has risen from 10 to 18 percent since March 2009.
When asked how they learned that Obama was a follower of Islam, 60 percent cited the "media." The specific media source cited most often was television (16 percent), but given that the largest category (36 percent) is the rather vague "media or news," I'm suspicious that the 7 percent figure for those who got this info off the old Interweb is a tad low. Even if we factor out the web crazies and the rants and harangues of Sean Hannity and Rush "Make Mine 'Oxy," please," Limbaugh, we also have to realize that given the stunted attention spans of the dedicated denizens of Web-World, the take on a statement like "Barack Obama is obviously not a Muslim," depends primarily on whether the listener was able to stay tuned for the duration of a complete sentence.
Moreover, as Slate columnist Jack Schaefer points out, regrettably enough, the Pew Poll failed to ask "If a Muslim bit you on the ass, would you be able to identify his religion?" Alluding to the 18 percent who believe Obama is a closet Islamic. Schaefer notes that the last time the Gallup people bothered to ask, precisely the same percentage of respondents thought that the sun revolved around the earth. Of course, this raises the question of how many of the "birthers" who don't think Oby was born in the U.S. also don't realize Hawaii is a state. A year ago, a national poll showed that more than a quarter of the 38 percent of Americans who either didn't believe Oby is really a U.S. native or are not sure also didn't know Hawaii is a state or were not sure about it.
In the end, of course, this really isn't about thinking or knowing anything. To fall back on a popular cliché these days, it's about the "willful suspension of disbelief," which let's face it, sounds a hell of a lot easier than confronting reality these days. No way our heroic chieftains who took us to war in Iraq could have been lying their asses off to justify the death, maiming, and enormous waste of money that has brought us to the point of scurrying our butts out just beyond the border so we can feign unawareness when the place falls to pieces over the next few months. Likewise, no way our intrepid captains of finance could have pulled off this enormous scam that has ruined so many lives and crippled so many public institutions. There has to be a conspiracy here, some secret sinister force that is working through its puppet in the White House to sell us out to Osama or to destroy us from within by forcing a socialist, one-world philosophy down our throats.
This, of course, would be where our man. B.O. comes in. Clearly, I sympathize with him because of all the smears and innuendo and outright lies he has had to put up with. On the other hand, however, he asked for this job, and if he didn't see this coming, his naïveté exceeds even his prodigious intelligence. In some ways, this naïveté served him well during the campaign, for it made his optimism and commitment to making America whole again seem pure and refreshing. Once he put his hand on that Bible, however, he should have ditched the rose-colored glasses and notched back the grandiose idealism a little bit. The disturbing thing is, he still doesn't seem to get it, even after managing to shove through a health care reform program at a time when economic recovery was by far the dominant public concern, only to find that some dismiss his efforts as a total failure, while candidates for statewide offices assure voters that they will do their damnedest to block or limit the implementation of Obama Care in their jurisdictions.
Obama's recent statements about the Islamic community center slated for construction near ground zero on 9/11 are a case in point. Whatever genuine matter of principle may led him to get involved in this, it amounted to an act of political self-mutilation that also did little to pretty up a Democratic party already in serious need of some cosmetic help. On a philosophical level, Obama's defense of the right of a local Muslim group to erect this structure sounds perfectly appropriate in a country dedicated to religious freedom. However, if he felt compelled to weigh in on this, he might have followed up on his vigorous defense of religious liberty with an equally spirited call for the folks behind this project to consider the sensitivity of this situation and ask themselves whether the real, substantive needs of the local Muslim community might not be served just as well in another location. His remarks came after the aforementioned Pew survey, but it doesn't take much of a pundit to see that what he said won't exactly be turning any of these numbers around for him.
It's not just a matter of his own numbers either. Has he forgotten all of those other Democrats farther down the ticket who are subject to the whims of the sovereign voter this fall? Their general prospects weren't all that bright to start with, and I doubt that he got many thank-you notes from them after he interjected himself into what is, for a Democrat, the mother of all political no-win situations.
Here in Georgia, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Roy Barnes suddenly heard somebody calling him way down in Savannah when Oby made the ATL scene recently, and one can hardly blame him under the circumstances. To say that Barnes's Republican opponent, former Congressman Nathan Deal, left Washington with something of a cloud over his conduct while in office is a bit of an understatement. Hurricane Katrina would be more like it. Still, Mr. Prez, you might tell your lippy press secretary, Robert Gibbs (an Auburn guy--What can I say?), to put a sock in it when it comes to references to Mr. Deal's difficulties. Deal is itching to distract voters from a past more checkered than a NASCAR flag by trying to run against you rather than Roy Barnes. From what I'm seeing across the country, he ain't the only Republican thinking this way either. You may think that all of the people who believe you are a Muslim are idiots. However, you should have long since realized from observing your colleagues in D.C. that idiots not only vote, but show a strong preference for their own kind when they do.
