Oops, just noticed 'quiet' is missing in my post--meant to say 'they wisely kept quiet about their plan.'
Scott Ott reports:Obama Scraps Plan to Change Middle Name
by Scott Ott for ScrappleFace
Despite the fact that his middle name has been branded as “inappropriate rhetoric” by his presidential rival, Barack Obama announced today that he’s scrapping a plan to change the name before inauguration day.
Just yesterday, the chairman of the Lehigh County (Pa.) Republican Party was chastised by Sen. John McCain’s campaign for using the name ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ during a McCain political rally.
Sen. McCain said he’s sensitive to the issue because his own middle name, Sidney, “sounds either foreign or girly” and he has threatened to “beat the gumption out of anyone who uses it…except for Gov. Palin, who could kick my keister six ways to Sunday.”
“We don’t have to stoop to reminding people,” said Sen. McCain, “that Sen. Obama has a middle name that crawls out of a spider hole and bows toward Mecca five times a day. Besides, if we wanted to stir up xenophobia, we could just say ‘Barack Obama’…which I think comes from the bar scene in Star Wars.”
Initially, campaign insiders said, Sen. Obama mulled changing the name because he believed that the presidential oath of office administered by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had to include his full name.
“He didn’t want to spur panic in the small towns and rural areas where folks cling to their guns and religion,” an unnamed source said. “Obama has great compassion on the little people and he didn’t want them unduly alarmed.”
However, he abandoned name-change plans after a review of historical records revealed that Ronald Wilson Reagan (’81), James Earl ‘Jimmy’ Carter (’77) and Richard Milhouse Nixon’s (’73) middle names were left out when they took their oaths, each for a good reason.
President Reagan sought to avoid offering an uncompensated endorsement to the manufacturer of sporting equipment. Mr. Carter, a humble Georgia peanut farmer, grew concerned his middle name sounded like a pretentious title of royalty, and thus he used only ‘Jimmy’. Mr. Nixon, in a prophetic decision, helped historians avoid confusing him with Bart Simpson’s best friend.
Gerald R. Ford (’74) used his middle initial, to avoid having to say ‘Rudolph’ because he didn’t want to stir up the latent, but virulent, anti-Germanic sentiment that threatened to tear the nation apart during the disco era.
Both Lyndon Baines Johnson (’63) and John Fitzgerald Kennedy (’61), on the other hand, used their full names during the swearing-in ceremony, according to one presidential historian, “so they could have nifty, monogram nicknames like FDR.”
Sen. Obama noted again that he is not a Muslim, and that Americans shouldn’t fear his “funny sounding name.”
“If you want to be scared of something,” he added, “be frightened of my socialistic domestic policies, my amoral social policies and my capitulationist foreign policy. After all, what’s in a name?” |
