What's in a name?
Do Obama and Huckabee sound like Presidential names to you? It is not widely known that they were made up by the Presidential Names Committee of the Department of Interior of the US Government. The remit of the Committee was to come up with Candidate names that would indicate to the US voter and to the world at large that they have a multicultural choice, while in fact the end result will be as usual a President with a name like Nixon, Ford, Carter, or Bush. It is not the looks of the candidate that count, nor his policies, but rather how short and Anglo-Saxon sounding his name is. This is easy for voters to remember at the ballot box. According to this theory, Clinton and Romney should be the Democratic and Republican nominees, respectively.
However, the victory of Obama and Huckabee in the Iowa caucases appears to be an anomaly inconsistent with this theory. But, there can be reasons for this. First of all, in Iowa the caucus mechanism tends to select candidates who are out of the ordinary, who promise the voters change, that they are not competent to provide, and in most cases raise their hopes. The voters are attracted to these un-Presidential names precisely because they are un-Presidential. It's the electoral equivalent of juvenile rebellion, "We'll show you" the Iowa voters are saying to the rest of the country, we'll throw up the least likely and least qualified candidates, just because..and then lets see what you make of that!
After all, Obama is arguably the most leftist of all the Democrats in the primary (his name was chosen to rhyme with "Osama", and who could imagine a President called "Barack") and Huckabee (an excellent choice of name) is the most right wing of all the Republicans. Obama is a third world plant put in to stop the Iraq war, and Huckabee is a right-wing evangelical intended to bring back prayer into the schools. However, they are not supposed to win. Don't worry, this is their high water mark, watch them gradually sink into oblivion. But, the meaning of the Iowa primary results is obscure, it shows that the most left wing and the most right wing candidates won at the same time (?) This can only indicate a degree of polarization previously unheard of, that could presage a civil war.
By the way I'm changing my name to Smith.
However, the victory of Obama and Huckabee in the Iowa caucases appears to be an anomaly inconsistent with this theory. But, there can be reasons for this. First of all, in Iowa the caucus mechanism tends to select candidates who are out of the ordinary, who promise the voters change, that they are not competent to provide, and in most cases raise their hopes. The voters are attracted to these un-Presidential names precisely because they are un-Presidential. It's the electoral equivalent of juvenile rebellion, "We'll show you" the Iowa voters are saying to the rest of the country, we'll throw up the least likely and least qualified candidates, just because..and then lets see what you make of that!
After all, Obama is arguably the most leftist of all the Democrats in the primary (his name was chosen to rhyme with "Osama", and who could imagine a President called "Barack") and Huckabee (an excellent choice of name) is the most right wing of all the Republicans. Obama is a third world plant put in to stop the Iraq war, and Huckabee is a right-wing evangelical intended to bring back prayer into the schools. However, they are not supposed to win. Don't worry, this is their high water mark, watch them gradually sink into oblivion. But, the meaning of the Iowa primary results is obscure, it shows that the most left wing and the most right wing candidates won at the same time (?) This can only indicate a degree of polarization previously unheard of, that could presage a civil war.
By the way I'm changing my name to Smith.
posted by Jack Cohen at 6:58 PM
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