Maybe it’s just that he’s been spending too much time in his secure, undisclosed location?

In April, the Pew Research Center did another one of those civic knowledge surveys. As usual with such polls, the results were shocking, but not surprising.

Despite “news and information revolutions,” the number of people who could name the vice president dropped from 74 percent of respondents in 1989 to 69 percent today. Similar falloffs were found in the number of people who could name their state governor (down from 74 to 66 percent) or the president of Russia (down from 47 to 36 percent).

According to Michael Schudson & Tony Dokoupil at cjr.org (“The Good-Citizen Quiz”), the results are not much different from similar polls taken six decades ago. CJR rightly wonders if these sorts of factoids are a good measure of a well-informed citizenry. It is certainly easy to imagine a voter staking out a position on health care without knowing the name of the secretary of HHS, or choosing sides in a transit vs. highways debate without knowing the name of the governor. But scoring that sort of survey is a lot harder.