Barack Hussein Obama: Middle-name dropping as smear

Posted 45 weeks 3 days ago by Joel

This has been nagging at me, so I'll just come out and get it off my chest:

Following CNN's projection that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) would win the Iowa Democratic caucus, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper asked CNN contributor and conservative radio talk show host Bill Bennett: "[D]oes this change the game a lot?" As Alex Koppelman noted at Salon.com's War Room blog, Bennett replied, "[A] remarkable breakthrough, this year, as the other group said -- 97 percent, in fact, Iowa, rural, white farming state. Barack Hussein Obama, a black man, wins this for the Democrats."

The better Obama does the next few weeks, the more you're going to hear conservative commentators using Barack Obama's middle name as a smear. And when progressives get their hackles up about it, conservatives will replay, all faux-innocence, that is his middle name.

And so it is. But in our country, people generally go by their first and last names. There are two basic groupings of people who go by first, middle and last names:

* Southerners.

* Murderers.

I don't think Bill Bennett is trying to lump in Obama with serial killers. But I think it's obvious that he and other commentators are trying to make the Muslim smear stick.

(And no, I don't think that a Muslim association should, in and of itself, be considered a smear. I'm not the kind of voter Bennett's targeting with such rhetoric, however.)

Fortunately, there's one time in politics when we get to hear a candidate's full name. Think William Jefferson Clinton. Think Ronald Wilson Reagan. Think James Earl Carter. How often did you hear those names?

On inauguration day.