Barak Hussein *Stevens*

Meh. So I picked a slow day to start blogging. I could bitch about my IT job but I'm pretty well-paid and fairly content outside of my job not matching my title due to office politics. and it's done elsewhere more interestingly than I could pull off. I'd aim for Office Space funny and land on Dilbert trite. Even bashing Dilbert is pretty weak so let's keep it moving and talk about Barak Obama.

He isn't electable. Now, if you want some dense political wonking about his 'thin record' or the question of race, look elsewhere. He's unelectable because his name is wrong. And not because it resembles the first name of that guy we didn't hang and can't find who actually set in motion the attacks that provided the pretext for the Iraq War. You know who I mean.

So why's his name wrong? Let's review the names of all the presidents. Ha, again wrong blog. Let's just look at the last ten and you can do the rest at home. Here we go: Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower. With the possible exception of Eisenhower, these names have a simple commonality in their plain and forthright sound. Nothing too ethnic. It's the same reason we won't see a president Guiliani.

Ok, I'm being a bit facetious but not really. I think that there is a subconscious factor to the comfort-level voters have with a candidate that relates to his or her name. It's not the only factor and I'm certain many people are able to ignore it. My out-there metaphor: If you think of a candidate's appeal as a recipe, consider their name an ingredient that people can taste but not name and it either serves the dish or undermines it. I'm sure there's some obscure branch of sociology that covers this but I have no idea what it is.

So I think that people look for comfort with a voter and for some, they just won't be able to get comfortable with Sen. Obama as President Obama. And they'll proceed from that misgiving to finding rationalizations for their misgivings. And they won't even realize they're doing it. The truth is in their gut, to paraphrase some guy with a funky name of his own.

Oh ... notice how I didn't even mention middle names? Stay for the quality ramblings.