18-24% of Americans Wrongly believe Obama is Muslim

Two stories I came across today show that a growing number of Americans now wrongly believe Obama to be Muslim. Time magazine reports that number to now be 24% and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports it to be 18%.

What's shocking is that a year ago the number of Americans who wrongly said that Obama was Muslim stood at 11%. Just 34% of Americans now correctly identify Obama's religion as Christian, it was 48% a year ago. A plurality now say they don't know what religion he is.

Why is this significant? Well, it indicates that the president has so lost touch with the American people that they no longer even know who he is. How can he possibly convince voters to support his policy positions when he can't even accurately communicate his own identity?

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2011799,00.html

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalp...alsely-believe-president-obama-is-muslim.html​

 

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To me, Obama represents the last Great American Myth, bro.

The idea that the president (pick a president, go on) can save the economy (somehow wrest control of it from Wall St), the environment, everyone's job, and of course the inalienable right to make as much money as possible, is the dream that's about to die.

Many are saying the dream was over a long time ago. He is really just wrapping things up and trying to reassure everyone it won't hurt too much. There is really very little he or anyone else can do, because the rich and powerful control the economy, bro. Get used to it.

I suppose you and some others could consider doing something totally 'crazy' and opt out of the capitalist/consumerist paradigm. Stop using credit, stop using money altogether and go back to a system that existed before banks (who lend you money and place you and your progeny in longterm debt), you know, barter system and local trade for goods and services, based on value that excludes the use of a fixed currency (i.e. "money").

ED: the "Obama is a Muslim" meme is just a symptom of the great American unwashed, griping about the mess they are in because they've been sucked into the "dream". Wakey, wakey, America!

 

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Mad, this has a little something do to with the right wing machine deliberately undermining the legitimacy of the president by nurturing those ideas. Also, Americans are fucking moronic little children with no critical thinking skills.

 

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so ah mad
what you have obama do?
perhaps some spiritual counsel from Mullah Jeremiah Wright?


americans distrust muslims
americans distrust obama
obama must be muslim

 

Actually, it is more tied to Obama's efforts to establish good relations with Saudi Arabia. There were numerous uproars during this period of his presidency, and it didn't help that the right-wing propaganda machine was anxious to make as much of these incidents as possible. The only way that we could prevent this sort of confusion would be to start putting right-wing pundits to death, but this would be illegal.

 

What are you talking about? I never heard anything about that. In fact, I never heard that relations had ebbed following Bush's presidency, in which he was practically a member of the Saudi royal family.

 

Barack Obama is not the same person as George W. Bush, though. To put it simply, Obama is not from the Old Family of American politicians, and this puts him at a disadvantage.

Fortunately, we can use this as a weapon to our own advantage by asserting that Obama's detractors are so ignorant about the man that they don't even know what religion he observes. Do you really want their candidate pulling the levers of YOUR economy? I don't think so.

Strategy, my friend. Strategy.

 

No one in America wants a president who has his hands on the levers of the economy, bro.

That job was handed to Wall St about two centuries ago, remember?

 

Ah, no, that's not true.

 

Interestingly, confusion regarding Obama's religion is increasing even among his supporters:

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalp...alsely-believe-president-obama-is-muslim.html​

 

Not trying to be argumentative, but could it also imply that more people are becoming unconcerned with the president's religious affiliation?

Sure, it could mean that the right is hammering home muslim connections or the left is becoming disenchanted ... or it could mean (hopefully?) religion itself in the general scheme of attaching significance is decreasing.

 

Correction: no-one wants a president who appears to have his hands on the levers of the Wall St economy--the real one.

They want to know all about how the "Fed" is doing, they think it has some kind of influence on Wall St. They want a president with a strong federal policy who can play with those levers, and leave Wall St alone.

 

Of course, but pointing this out doesn't make for good ad hominem. I intend for your guy to lose the next election, remember.

 

I do. I want the government to control Wall Street because they caused the wealth of this great nation (and that of many others) to disappear into nothingness. Just like the Great Depression. Not even Wall Street understands what they are doing with their complicated financial instruments. It is time we as a country engaged in commerce that meant something, not using money to make money. It's the worship of unearned riches, and it's a disease. It's the same reason we idolize Las Vegas, a vast symbol of everything that is wrong with America.

 

You realise your desire for a president who can control Wall St, means you are now targeted for assassination/rendition, bro?
(arf, arf)

 

Without the regulatory body of the government, there would be no Wall Street.

 

I can agree with that. The problem with America is Americans. We somehow went from thrifty hard working people to greedy gime gime gime people.

I partly blame people from New York. In the past they would have been called "City Slickers". You know, they move to the country side and screw all the good decent hardworking people over then move back to the city. Now everyone lives in a City or one size or another. We're all City Slickers.

Living in MI we had a LOT of people from NY move in about 70-90 years ago. Lots of the businesses were still owned by the descendants of those NY families. Many MI cities are named after NY suburbs (those not named after Native American place marks).


I feel as if the American Dream is almost over - not only in America but everywhere.

 

Yup, the two factors are how he presents himself and citizens out there listening to him. Nothing else is affecting people's ideas about the president. Since last year when it was 11%, he has been talking in a confused way about his religion and so many people - unavoidably controlled by this lack of clearness about his religion on his part - now also think he is Muslim.

This has all taken place in a media vaccuum.
Non-liberals have had nothing to do with this misconception.

 

That could well be because a plurality of Americans take the question of "what religion is so-and-so" to be asking for a specific sect and denomination, and not simply "Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/etc." A very large number of Americans understand the term "Christian" to refer exclusively to certain Protestant faiths, for another confounding factor. A survey of Americans on what religion the Pope is would likely not produce "Christian" as the most frequent answer - and there are manifold examples of the statistical difficulties related to the various, context-dependent meanings of "Christian" in effect in the US. Suffice it to say that this stuff depends heavily on exactly how the test is phrased.

And to that point, it occurs to me that I couldn't tell you what exact religion Obama belongs to, beyond it being some form of mainstream American Christianity.

The people responding "Muslim" are just nuts, though.

That hypothesis is not supported by a shift in the statistics on its own. It's also possible that alien invaders are using mind-control rays to mess with people who respond to surveys. There is no evidence in this survey to distinguish between those two causes.

Absent any further evidence, the most plausible cause is likely the correct one. And to that, it'd be hard to overlook the persistent efforts of certain media, activists and politicians to sow confusion over exactly this question. There is an entire cottage industry of teabagger dipshits relentlessly pushing the idea that Obama is a secret Muslim. They've been doing this for years now.

Meanwhile, it's pretty asinine to blame Obama for the fact that a small percentage of the electorate believes ludicrously false things about him - quite probably the people responding "Muslim" are not doing so because they haven't heard this clearly refuted, but because they subscribe to some sort of conspiracy theory.