Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Now this is just too weird to be true

Public Policy Polling decides to get into the heads of the birthers. And you thought Oily Taint was a nutty as it gets.

62% of Americans think Obama was born here, while 24% think he was not and 14% are unsure.

10% of the country thinks that he was born in Indonesia, 7% think he was born in Kenya, and 1% think he was born in the Philippines.

That leaves 20%, which includes at least some people who correctly believe that Obama was born in Hawaii, but who don't consider Hawaii to be part of the United States. You read that right- 6% of poll respondents think that Hawaii is not part of the country and 4% are unsure.

It's hard to say what the rest of that 20% thinks. We did ask them if they thought Obama was born in France and while less than half a percent of respondents did, two thirds of that remaining 20% said they 'weren't sure' whether Obama was a Frenchman.


How is it that more people think he was born in Indonesia than think he was born in Kenya? I've never even heard of anyone making that claim. Maybe they reverse engineered it from the claim that he attended a radical Islamist school there, but if that's the case, they haven't even been listening to Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs, they just arrived at it independently.

It is true, however, that Hawaii is not part of the United States.

3 comments:

kathy a. said...

where the hell are they getting their samples? the planet mars, maybe?

i don't comply with telephone polls, because i am so damned sick of those carpet cleaner and "your car warranty is about to expire!" people calling me all the time. actually, i don't comply with most polls, because cleaning the litter box frankly is a more rewarding task. so, who do they get to answer these questions?

Anonymous said...

Because he moved to Indonesia when he was 6. If one accuses him of being a ‘muslim’, etc. this part of his life history stands out, maybe becomes the only relevant part till he went to Columbia... His name was then Soetero, his sister Maya Soetero, his father a Muslim...a furrriner! Anti-muslim racism, which blacks/whites/hispanics indulge in overrides anti-black attitudes. (After all, probably the only thing known about Kenya is that it is in Africa and the ppl there are black, which is not so awful, right?)

Ana

whisker said...

Un-f-ing believable. This shows not only that Americans have a complete lack of knowledge of geography. But it also shows how people believe distorted information which was used to mar the guys image and cast shadows on his legitimacy. Anyway one might think that if Obama wasn't a qualified that the election board would have caught it.