"But He's a Muslim!"

Marty Kaplan
The Huffington Post

It made me think of my own family.

Having coined "O'Bama" for the Irish working-class values that Joe Biden brings to the Democratic ticket, Chris Matthews called his family in Pennsylvania -- where Scranton-born Biden is known as the state's "third senator" in some quarters -- to ask whether now they'd be voting for Obama.

"But he's a Muslim!" That's the reply Matthews told his viewers he got.

The Matthews clan is not alone. Going into the Democratic National Convention, depending on which poll you read, somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent of American voters thought that Obama is a Muslim. A Newsweek poll found that 26 percent thought he was raised as a Muslim (untrue), and 39 percent thought he grew up going to an Islamic school in Indonesia (also untrue).

I'm not shocked by Americans' ability to think untrue things. After all, under the relentless tutelage of the Bush administration and its media enablers, nearly 70 percent of the country thought that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in planning the Sept. 11 attack.

In fact, if you told me that double-digit percentages of voters believe that Jewish workers were warned to stay home on Sept. 11, or that the American landing on the moon was faked, or that every one of the words of the Bible is literally and absolutely true, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. It might make me think about the downsides of universal suffrage, the challenges facing public education, the limitations of "fact-checking" as a corrective to Swiftboating, the coarsening of public discourse, the devolution of news into entertainment, the risks to democracy of Rovian demagoguery -- stuff like that -- but it wouldn't make me question the methodology of the polls.

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