OPINION: We're witnessing the spread of dumb-ocracy

Clarence Page is a columnist and member of the editorial board at the Chicago Tribune.

Are Americans getting dumber? Evidence of that dreary possibility is offered by two new polls that show that since President Barack Obama's inauguration, the number of people who believe - wrongly - that he is a Muslim actually has increased.

Almost one in five Americans (18 percent) think President Obama is a Muslim, according to a new Pew Research Center poll, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is just 34 percent, down from 48 percent in March of last year. A Time magazine survey found an even higher number, 24 percent, who thought he was a Muslim.

What happened to the idea that the Internet Age would make everybody smarter? You can lead people to knowledge but you can't make them think. Beneath our national democracy runs a national dumb-ocracy, a vast community of folks who don't care all that much about civic engagement and other current affairs, except maybe Lindsay Lohan's drinking problems.

When our political knowledge is tested, most of us tend to flunk. You may recall studies like the one a few years ago finding that only one in four Americans could name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, but more than half could name at least two members of the Simpsons cartoon family.

Another poll a few years ago found only one in five Americans knew Congress has 100 senators and only two in five could name all three branches of government. That statistic can be found in "Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter" by Rick Shenkman, an associate professor of history at George Mason University.

No, Shenkman told me, he was not surprised by the rise in people unsure of Obama's religion, since "people follow the news so loosely that they are susceptible to any wild idea" and "myths are part of a larger narrative that people construct in their heads to make sense out of seismic events and upheavals."

Ironically, Team Obama has inadvertently encouraged doubt and confusion about his religious views, Shenkman said, by discontinuing their vigorous rapid-response effort - including a website dedicated to myth-busting - after the election was over.

Still, I also am reminded of experiments cited by legal scholar and Obama regulatory adviser Cass Sunstein in his short, insightful book, "On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done." They found that efforts to debunk myths also serve to reinforce the falsehoods in many minds merely by reporting them.

And following the outspokenly Christian President George W. Bush, Obama contrasts sharply with his talk of his "Muslim roots," referring to his late African father. To some listeners, it's hard to tell the difference between "Muslim roots" and "Muslim."

And, while the polls predictably show Obama's ideological opponents more likely than others to believe myths that reinforce Obama's out-of-the-mainstream otherness, increasing numbers of Democrats and independents also showed rising uncertainty.

The Time poll was taken after Obama defended the constitutional right of Muslims to build a mosque and community center near Ground Zero. That probably added to the confusion of many who believe, or maybe want to believe, that Obama is a Muslim himself.

If Obama doesn't display his religious beliefs as much as his immediate predecessor did, I understand. He has bigger priorities as president. Yet, like other political officeholders, he must be haunted by this knowledge: When the elections are close, the deciding votes usually come from the least informed, least-engaged and most emotionally driven voters. Heaven help us.