mangeorge’s anecdote called to mind that South Park episode in which the townspeople complain about the black people moving in ruining the neighborhood – because they’re rich. In the end, they organize against and chase the “richers” out of town. It has one of the best SP punchlines, delivered by Mr. Garrison: “At least we got rid of all those damn nig–”
That is to say, anyone who claims to object to the man on the basis of what his name sounds like is certainly engaging in a bit of misdirection.
You guys are whooshing me, right? You’re actually surprised that the average Joe citizen would be reluctant to vote for someone named Obama? That’s sorta the point of all the jokes. I mean, they’re not that good on their own…the point is, we’re not going to vote for someone named Obama. Or Vilsack (Hail the new Vilsackian era) no matter how brillaint they are or how good they’d be for the country. We’re artificial and shallow like that.
I mean, before you even start to worry about running for President you need the following qualities or you will auto fail if you somehow find your way to the general:
Male
White
Straight
Christian (and nothing fancy here either, no need to apply Catholics or Latter Day Saints…well, maybe a Catholic since it happened once but something goofy will have to happen politically; being Catholic is an auto dropping of ~10% in the polls)
Have a “normal” name
Be tall; in fact, the tallest candidate usually wins doesn’t he?
Have nice hair
Have a nice jaw
Good shoulders help with the projection
And don’t even start to cite a poll saying “Well x% said they’d vote for a black/woman/midget President!” Yeah, that’s what they say. Most people don’t like to acknowledge their shallowness even to a random pollster. As soon as the poll that matters come around you’ll find large chunks just vanishing, sorta like what happened in those states that voted for gay marriage rights.
But uh, yeah, run Hillary. She could win if something catastrophic happened, like a meteor the size of a mountain hit Nashville, or if zombies started to rise from the ground…or if the Republican party is hit with the largest scandal evar*. But otherwise…it’s pure fantasy.
Maybe a gay scandal. I think we’d vote for a woman over a gay man.
That’s because “Osama bin Laden” isn’t really correct Arabic. While there isn’t a single method of transliterating Arabic script that everyone could agree with, we can still say that some methods are better than others. Arabic language has only three vowels, a, u and i, each of which has a short and a long form. Thus, if we want to state a person’s name in Arabic using Latin script, we probably shouldn’t use either o or e as these don’t exist in Arabic, so for example “Mohammed” becomes more correct “Muhammad”. For this reason, it can be argued that OBL’s name should really be written as Usama bin Ladin, hence UBL. To assure the correct pronunciation of a native English speaker, Usama might even be written as Ussamah in English text.
Eurograff thanks for the info (you just fought a little of my ignorance); but everybody in the U.S. is used to seeing the name “Osama”, so it’s unlikely we’ll start spelling it in a more logical way.
Maybe Sen. Obama will get elected, and unlike his predecessor, will actually be concerned about capturing bin Laden. Then we might see the headline: OBAMA BAGS OSAMA.
I must say that I take some heart in the fact that this fellow’s initial (at least public) reaction is that he objects to the candidate because of his name, rather than the fact that he has African ancestry.
That was addressed this weekend on the Chris Matthews show. They said that while the question “Would you vote for a black person?” was usually met with positive answers, they followed that with the question “Would your mom/dad/neighbor/best friend vote for a black person/woman?” to filter out the people that just gave the “right answer” to the pollster. They didn’t give any numbers but they referred to the Harold Ford race.
Don’t know if that’s helpful or what, but it has been addressed. Sorry I couldn’t find numbers on the fly, but I’ll dig around if you want.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again- Obama’s chances for any national office would improve dramatically if his name were John Smith. It’s hard enough to get some whites to vote for a black for anything- getting them to vote for a black guy with an uber-black name may be too much.
I must be different. To me the thing that the name Obama brought first to mind was “Hossanah”, maybe because I imagine a choir singing “Obama in the highest” at his inaugural.
