The question was raised way back when his run was all speculation: Will being saddled with the name Barack Hussein Obama hinder his chances? You’ll have no doubt noticed certain members of the right wing noise machine, such as Ann Coulter, refer to him exclusively as B. Hussein Obama in an attempt to conflate him with murderous tyrants. And then there was CNN with this mistake:
Goon Hemogoblin! said it best:
Here’s why the name issue is dead.
1) It’s a name. It’s literally name-calling; racist, baseless, idiotic name-calling. That makes it a really, really crappy smear.
2) Obama is a machine. A smear like that is nothing - he can work around it, and has been his entire career. I absolutely guarantee that he can make the people who put stock in it look like ignorant bigots they are.
3) His 2004 speech. He specifically turned his “goofy name” into the punchline of his speech. You can’t hit back at that.
Seriously - here’s what they have; his middle name is Hussein. Period. That’s a shitty thing to base a smear on, and is exactly the sort of thing that can explode back in your face.
But that won’t stop some people, of course. This same issue came up when he ran for the senate, and Obama’s response is on record:
“(The pundits) said you can’t win in a year like this with a name like Obama. There was quite a bit of confusion at first, but it did get me free airtime on Al Jazeera.”
Sure, there might be people out there that won’t vote for the skinny kid with the funny name, but they probably wouldn’t like his politics, either.
