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As ludicrous as it surely seems to most Americans, there apparently is a not-insignificant portion of the voting public who has doubts about the candidate's "Americanism."
And it's an issue that, like the Wright relationship, will not just die a natural death due to the silence of the Obama campaign.
Remember back a few months when the media was feasting on the "news" that Barack had for a long time in his youth gone by the first name "Barry?" Trivial story for sure.
My own first name, "Fredrick" (no "e" between Fred and rick because my father thought Fredrick looked and sounded stronger than Frederick, and I agree with him,) is nowhere as unique as "Barack." Yet I have gone by Fred or Freddy my entire life, much less intimidating, much less Germanic than my full first name.
To my ear and to my eyes, both "Barack" and "Fredrick" register as patently assertive, vaguely intimidating first names. Cool with me; but maybe not with the "masses." Add the additional characteristic of a somewhat foreign-sounding tinge to "Barack" and something this silly could cost a guy the Presidency.
The following is going to sound so superficial that I'm almost embarrassed to write it, but here goes: would the candidate consider resurrecting, at least from time to time, "Barry?" How can anyone be suspicious of a guy named "Barry?" Or at least nicknamed "Barry," much as I am nicknamed "Fred" or "Freddy"?
Barry is approachable, a regular guy...so is Freddy; Barack and Fredrick aren't.
I'm talking about just injecting "Barry" into the discourse from time to time. "Yeah," Obama could say, "my old friends from the hood still call me Barry, as does my mother," for example.
Humanize the candidate somewhat. He's too good-looking, too smart, too eloquent, too well educated, too well tailored...and his first name is too intimidating and too unusual.
You can't make him ugly, you can't make him dumb, you can't un-educate him and he sure ain't gonna dress like a hick...but an occasional Barry may go a long way to making him "one of the boys."
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2 comments:
As ridiculous as the underlying premise to your observation is, I'm afraid there is a modicum of truth in it.
Howz'about let's stop thinking up ways to soften the oh-so-nerve wracking intrusion into our fragile lexicon of such phonetically obtuse and consonenticly rude names as "Barrack"...
(oh, that hard Ka sound is frightening me!)...
And instead we figure out how to erradicate whatever causes people to be caught up in the unrelentling throes of "idiot-think" & "moron-idea"...before it cripples this nation completely.
bix2012,
Have you read One Dimension Man by H. Marcuse?
If not, you would enjoy it immensely.
But the battle against "moron-think" & "idiot think" is lost.
The only thing an individual can do, I think, is not succumb to it.
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