Before 9/11, Osama bin Laden was far from a household name. In fact, it sounded as alien to our ears as any name I can think of.
But after 9/11, the name Osama bin Laden was repeated constantly daily in the US. When Barack Obama became a candidate, all of a sudden, the name wasn’t as unusual to our ears.
This is not a question about politics. It’s more of a marketing debate. The name Obama nicely rhymes with Osama obviously, so my thought is that Osama’s name saturation helped Obama immeasurably with not only name recognition, but name acceptance.
I don’t want this to get into a debate about Obama’s qualifications, or if you like democrats over republicans. I want to focus on whether or not he received a boost regarding his name because it was close to Osama’s.
Personally, I don’t think Obama gets elected as the democratic nominee, yet alone the president without the name similarity. With his name, people spent time listening to him up front, to try to hear what this guy with the “strange name” was all about. The fact that he was black also played into it of course, but we’ve had black candidates in this country before. The fact that he had a muslim name that was similar to the leader of a terrorist organization that just pulled off the greatest terrorist attack on US soil, played as a positive, not a negative. I believe if Obama’s name was a more american sounding Leroy Washington, or even a different muslim name like Abdul Mohammed, I don’t see it happening. I don’t believe he would have been around in the primary cycle long enough to hear his views on issues. I think the media was fascinated with the guy’s name as much as anything at the beginning, giving him more attention than the average candidate.
I’m curious as to what the TM think.
What are your thoughts? Could Obama have inadvertently benefited by having a name that sounded so much like Osama?
I’d assume it hurt him more than it helped him. Because it’s more common to be bigoted against Muslims than it was pre-911. And many people are convinced that Obama is a Muslim.
Is this sort of along the lines of “any publicity is good publicity”?
I think a marketing expert would probably say that it would not be a great idea to associate your product with a mass-murdering terrorist. We don’t see advertisements featuring “New! CharlesManson cheese puffs!” or “Drive the new Chrysler Hitlervan. It’s vunderbar!”
Exactly. I simply wonder if a freshman senator would have been given the attention he did receive without the name. Once people heard what he said, it didn’t matter much (I would assume), but I’m asking if it gave him the foothold in the average person’s mind that he would have not actually achieved otherwise.
I don’t believe that there is any substance whatsoever to this hypothesis.
Like Lobohan said, it is virtually undeniable that Obama’s name was a slight negative, due to all the secret Muslim and birther nonsense. Nobody strains to listen more carefully to the guy with the funny name; that’s just nonsense.
The “secret” to Obama’s success are obvious: he is a very good speaker, he’s reasonably moderate, and he built a very strong political organization that just plain beat the crap out of Clinton and McCain. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; Obama won because he was a strong, multifaceted candidate.
More or less this. I wouldn’t say GWB wouldn’t have been re-elected, but going without the 9/11-Afghanistan-Iraq-civil rights combo would have changed things too much to say who would have gotten the vote in 2008.
But if GWB had lost in 2004, presumably the incumbent and not Obama would have been the 2008 Democratic candidate.
Out of context, “Osama” doesn’t sound especially “Arabic” anyway. Sounds like it could be a name from one of the Archipelagic or Pacific Island languages. “Obama” is kind of the same way; it actually is the name of a town in Japan. When I first encountered him on a talk show, I imagined he was of Ethiopian Christian descent.
No. I don’t think the many times people called Obama a terrorist (by accident or on purpose) helped him get elected. I don’t think there is any evidence for the idea that his name itself would have been a problem if it had been unfamiliar to people or for the idea that people stopped to listen so they could find out what the weird name guy was saying.
I’m not sure I agree with this, and I’ll use myself as an example. I knew nothing about Obama in 2008. I remember thinking "this guy doesn’t have a prayer. Not only is he a minority, but his name does him no favors. However, when I watched the democratic debates, I listened to him a bit more intently in the beginning; as you point out, he is an excellent speaker, and he quickly became someone to take seriously. But at the beginning, I definitely gave him as much attention as I gave to Hillary, and I can’t say that about all the candidates.
I have to admit, he was a curiosity to me, and not because he was black. I was interested in what he had to say and when he spoke, I did pay attention to him. how this country’s electorate would react to a candidate who’s name “sounded” muslim and also a lot like two of this country’s more famous and contemporary enemies. Barrack Hussain Obama (pardon any spelling errors) didn’t strike me as a winning moniker or someone to take too seriously. But I personally listened more intently to him than I would have if his name was Bob Smith.
Obama got attention early on because he was basically the only bright spot in what was otherwise a disastrous year for the Dems in 2004, as they lost seats in the House and Senate, had their Senate leader loose re-election and failed to win against what looked like a vulnerable President Bush. But Obama easily won a formerly GOP held seat in Illinois (the incumbant resigned at the last minute due to a sex scandal, leaving the GOP running a placeholder candidate), so even before he won, they put him as a speaker at the Dem Convention where he got his name in lights and gave a good speech.
The OP’s theory is silly. Obama owes far more to the Borg Chick in Star Trek then he does Osama bin Laden.
CMC fnord!
Good luck with that, 'cause I just tried and it looks like you’re gonna have to sift through a whole lot of shit to find something worth posting.
Obama’s grandfather converted to Islam, adding Hussein to his name, and passing that name down to his son. I do not think it coincidence that he also gave his son an Arabic origin first name, rather than a Luo styled name.
Anyway, I’m not seeing what the OP is seeing. Obama won because he was the only real anti-war candidate and Hillary didn’t run a good campaign. I think that among Democratic voters, the fact that he is black was a net plus in getting the nomination, too. In the general, I’m not so sure whether that helped or hurt him (net).
ETA: Let’s not forget the horrible campaign that McCain ran, including Ms. Palin, VP candidate extraordinaire. And the trashing of the GOP that GWB accomplished.
I have no doubt that Hillary would have won had she run against McCain.
Notice how you didn’t mention Bin Laden here? I don’t think a lot of people paid more attention to him because of the name. As it is, he was a black Senator (the only one at the time) who won a landslide election in a big state and later ran for president. He already had plenty of unusual surface characteristics.
This is all correct except for the bit about the incumbent. The incumbent was Peter Fitzgerald, and he chose not to run for re-election. Jack Ryan won the Republican nomination and dropped out after a sex scandal, leaving a period of more than a month where Obama had no opponent and was able to campaign all across the state and basically cruise to victory even after Alan Keyes moved to Illinois to accept the nomination.