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The America I look forward to living in is a nation where having “Hussein” as part of one’s name, regardless of whether you are the guy living next door or the guy in contention to be the next President of the United States, becomes a non-issue. No, let me rephrase that. “Non-issue” implies a lack of active engagement or understanding with matters that might fall outside our localized experiences, so how about I say instead, “I look forward to the day when we as Americans are able to look at ourselves, in all our cultural pluralism, with a true sense of enlightened context.”

I say this in response to the disappointing and, frankly, offensive tirade that has gotten a lot of press coverage recently by conservative radio talk show host Bill Cunningham (I’m sure to the secret glee of Mr. Cunningham whose bread and butter, so typical of vocally radical media pundits, comes from the manipulation of hyperbole), who had opened for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain at a Cincinnati rally. You can see a clip of his rhetoric in the clip below.

What’s so objectionable to me is not Mr. Cunningham’s political attacks questioning his record (an almost inevitable facet to most heated election campaigns)–I’ll let Senator Obama’s campaign managers and the media sort out the relative mendacity or veracity of his allegations–but the subtext applied to his rhetoric that essentially channels his inner-bigot.

And yes, Senator Obama’s full name is indeed Barack Hussein Obama. But faulting him for his name would be like like faulting by association anybody who happened to share the name “John” with John Wilkes Booth, the man who had assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. And like “John,” “Hussein” is not that uncommon a name, just not in our neck of the woods. We only happen to be familiar with the name due to the unfortunate infamy of an erstwhile Iraqi dictator.

Mr. Cunningham has made a most disingenuous protestation in a subsequent interview on the Fox network’s program “Hannity and Colmes” that he sees no problem in using Senator Obama’s middle name, going so far as to suggest he is honoring him with the gravitas that a full name affords such noted Presidents as Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John Fitzerald Kennedy.

Were it true, it would be quite the magnanimous but perhaps bipolar gesture from an individual–at a Republican rally mind you–who in the same breath called Democratic presidential candidate Senator Obama “a hack Chicago, Daley-style politician who is picturing himself as change.” Honestly, whose intelligence does he think he’s trying to insult?

Mr. Cunningham’s form of incipient racism is the kind that can be the most frustrating to contemplate for any minority. In America, at least a minority knows where he or she can stand in relation to the more overt expressions of racism, such as spray-painted swastikas or hanging nooses. Such clearly manifest forms of ethnic hatred are easy to identify and, being criminal acts, allow minorities to find, along with perfectly righteous indignation, appropriate legal recourse.

But in a way, the most difficult form of racism to deal with is the kind that is dealt by subterfuge and suggestion. A victim of these more subtle forms of racism can make accusations, but a perpetrator can hide behind false intentions to the point of making the victim appear to be overreacting, or even worse, to appear to be race-baiting.

This is precisely the form of insidious racism that Mr. Cunningham is using. He has made the argument that people who take issue with use of the name “Hussein” are the ones that are actually the bigots. The sad truth of the matter is, there is some validity to his statement…but I’ll speak to that later on. The matter at hand is Mr. Cunningham’s particular brand of racism.

Regardless of the reasoning behind why some object to hearing Senator Obama’s middle name used, it still doesn’t make him any less complicit in his own unacknowledged bigotry. A closet bigot’s classic technique is borrowed straight from the magician’s handbook regarding the art of misdirection, i.e. drawing the audience’s attention to one action while the real action is going on elsewhere.

Let’s look at how Mr. Cunningham accomplishes this:

1. He, being a media person, would be savvy to the marketing power of names in the public arena; and knowing that names do not occur in a vacuum, he would know how appeal to the xenophobia of the less enlightened members of his audience regarding Senator Obama’s full name.
2. He would know that the name “Hussein,” besides having a negative association with the former Iraqi dictator Sadam Hussein, is of Arabic origin and thus also carries unfortunate negative connotations across America due to the myopic coverage by mainstream media of radical Islam.
3. He would know there are certain political realities, for better or for worse, needed to become an elected official in the United States, e.g., U.S. politicians have predominantly Christian affiliations; so the more he can ramp up apocryphal allegations of Muslim ties to Senator Obama’s campaign, the better to galvanize Obama’s opponents. For the record, Senator Obama is Christian.
4. He would know that emphasizing his middle name (even going so far as to engage in further hyperbole by having called him “Barack Mohammed Hussein Obama” on his own radio show, even though Mohammed is not part of his name) and coyly placing such references as “the great prophet” to falsely create a Muslim subtext.
5. He would also know that since “Hussein” is Senator Obama’s legal middle name, he would gain an inoculation against most accusations of bigotry. Thus he would be free to conduct a campaign of what amounts to guerrilla racism.

Senator John McCain, to his credit, understood the true intent behind Mr. Cunningham’s rhetoric and quickly repudiated him (at the cost of rallying various conservative media pundits, never huge fans of Senator McCain to begind with, against him). However, when asked whether Senator’s middle name was an appropriate topic of discussion for the presidential campaign, he answered, “No, it is not.”

And that sentiment seems to be shared by a lot of Obama supporters as well. It has raised the question among some members of the media who essentially are asking, “Well, why not?”

I think Senator McCain’s response was well intentioned, but this question of “why not” actually speaks to the other form of bigotry that Mr. Cunningham had accused those reluctant to engage in the use of his middle name, i.e., the bigotry of contrition.

Implicit to the complaint in the Obama camp about using his middle name is that there is something wrong with using his middle name. Herein lies the dilemma. How can Obama bury the use of his middle name without giving the appearance of being needlessly apologetic for an aspect of his cultural heritage? That in itself could be construed as a form of bigotry.

Nathan Thornburgh of Time addresses this particular dilemma in his own article, “Why Is Obama’s Middle Name Taboo?” In addition to Mr. Cunningham’s problematic rally, he also brings up the controversy raised by a “leaked” photograph of Senator Obama wearing a turban, allegedly from someone inside the Clinton campaign. That’s a whole other matter, but it raises some of the same issues. I wanted to highlight his points here.

The same day that Cunningham was dropping H-bombs on Cincinnati, Obama was at the Democratic debate in Cleveland, hastily accepting Hillary Clinton’s assertion that she didn’t order the leak of a picture of Obama wearing a turban in Kenya. “I think that’s something we can set aside,” he said.

It was a missed opportunity. He could have explained that he has nothing to hide. Explained why there’s nothing wrong with him dressing in ceremonial clothes on official visits — like batik Bill in Indonesia in 1994 or headscarf Hillary in Eritrea in 1997. Maybe even explained why his middle name is Hussein — what his heritage means, and what it doesn’t mean. In short, to reintroduce himself to those general election voters who are just starting to pay closer attention.

No matter what his advisers say, Obama wins nothing by shying away from his differences. After all, Obama is the candidate of change. He should take a cue from McCain’s courage on Iraq. Say what you will about McCain, but he knows he’s the war candidate. And though may have regretted saying it out loud, McCain clearly accepts that if voters don’t buy his vision for the war, he’ll lose. It’s not too much risk for Obama to stake his campaign on voters’ ability to rationally understand the difference between a Hawaii-born Christian and Saddam Hussein, the butcher of Baghdad.

I agree with Mr. Thornburgh’s position only in part, because while his long-term goal is admirable, it’s the short-term realities that make such a position problematic. As I mentioned in the very beginning of this post, I would love to live in an America where having “Hussein” for a middle name would be no big deal. For us to get there, we need to have a dialogue about the assumptions and perceptions that come to play in our multicultural society. But timing, as they say, is everything.

The problem lies in the fact that Senator Obama, as the minority candidate, has the extremely difficult position of having to create the perception of being a political “everyman” devoid of ethnocentric interest while at the same maintaining pride (but not too much) in embracing his ethnic identity. If he pulls too far one way, he might be seen as a “sell-out” candidate for whites; if he pulls too far the other way, he could be perceived as a fringe candidate for black minorities, or by proxy, minority issues in general.

In the current realities of an election campaign, taking up issues of race could send Senator Obama precipitously down a public perception that destabilizes this difficult balancing act. When it comes down to it, mainstream America doesn’t like to engage at length or in depth with the tumult of interethnic issues.

It’s entirely regrettable that we still live in a country where even the hint of having Muslim ties (regardless of their lack of truthfulness) would have to be the object of instant condemnation by a prominent politician such as Senator Obama. Why couldn’t a Muslim be a viable Presidential candidate, no more or no less than a Mormon one or a Catholic one?

And it’s even more regrettable that we have people such as Bill Cunningham who are well aware of the dilemma and are able to exploit it through their cynical distortions that are ultimately meant to divide as opposed to unite our multicultural society.

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