Can You Say Hussein

Forget about the criminals, the bomb planters, and the America haters who Barack built his career with. Forget about the inexperience. Forget about him having falsely portrayed himself as an agent of change. If this catches on, it will be the thing that stops Barack cold.

There is, if we can believe the New York Times,

a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name.

On the one hand, the instincts of these young activists for Barack are correct. A name is only foreign until it becomes common enough for its foreignness to be absorbed. But Hussein is a problematic middle name for Barack to carry because it provides a confirmation of people's worst fears - that Barack himself is different enough that we can't know who he is, what he believes, and what he wants for America.

“I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s name like it was some sort of cuss word,” Mr. Strabone wrote in a manifesto titled “We Are All Hussein” that he posted on his own blog and on dailykos.com.

Barack is scary - his level of inexperience is astounding, his associations are disastrous, and his politics are liberal beyond what voters can imagine. He takes the fear that Al Gore and John Kerry triggered in Americans and pushes it up a couple of notches. His middle name intuitively suggests the danger that he represents.

Some Obama supporters say they were moved to action because of what their own friends, neighbors and relatives were saying about their candidate. Mark Elrod, a political science professor at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., is organizing students and friends to declare their Husseinhood on Facebook on Aug. 4, Mr. Obama’s birthday.

What these young supporters of Barack don't see is that they reflect the world that liberalism has created - they are naive, inexperienced, uneducated, coddled - they're actually living at home while campaigning for Change! And they think they live in a country that is too conservative! They are not equipped to change our perception of Barack or his middle name - they confirm the worst fears that it symbolizes!

“It’s one of those things that just takes off, because everybody got it right away,” said Stephanie Miller, a left-leaning comedian who blurted out the idea one day during a broadcast of her syndicated radio talk show and repeated it on CNN.

Ms. Miller and her fellow new Husseins are embracing the traditionally Muslim name even as the Obama campaign shies away from Muslim associations.

Stephanie Hussein Miller won't change a bunch of minds on her own, but the more young radicals she can get to adopt the name Hussein, the tougher the job of convincing Americans that they can trust Barack becomes.