The Lantern

Issue date: 5/14/08 Section: Opinion

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. That's how Shakespeare put it. In other words, a rose is a rose is a rose.

Apparently this truism no longer applies in today's climate of nearly tri-partisan politics. People keep talking about Hillary Clinton acting as a pre-emptive spoiler by staying in the game. I thought that was ridiculous just a few weeks ago, before I'd heard of people so set against Obama that they would rather vote for John McCain.

And I found out that apparently in this day and age, even among Democrats, a name can mean more than anything substantive.

How can people call themselves liberals when they manage to get caught up on something as stupid as a middle name? I've grown up associating liberal with a couple different things, but "open-minded" and "sympathetic" were always big ones to me, and now I'm finding that people will use anything they can to excuse their fear of change.

We shouldn't have foreigners or foreign-sounding names in the White House, a Polish-born friend of mine said. It will be in the Constitution some day.

And then he told me that the president having the middle name Hussein would send a bad message internationally.

What kind of message would that send, exactly? To a democratically minded people, it seems like it would say: We're not afraid to embrace diversity in even our biggest election. To a bunch of thick-headed bigots, it might say we're weak and have been invaded by foreign extremists. Either way, it doesn't represent the truth of America. But would that first message, the one our allies would see, really be so bad?

In case if it's not patently obvious, I am an Obama supporter, but I'm a Democrat first and would never vote for another four years of Republican reign. It's not that I'm tired of rich old white men in office. I just don't agree with the Republican stance on almost anything.

In the past, it's been pretty obvious that party values trump campaign promises almost all the time, so I'm going to vote along those lines. I dislike Clinton because of personal disagreement. I think she's a closet snob, a bit of a liar and she's made votes in Congress that tried to restrict First Amendment rights, but I don't want to see McCain in office. I think our country has already started to hemorrhage from the Republican's antiquated stances.

Obama could change his name to Farrakhan Hussein-Castro Obama and I would still have no problem voting for him. I still think the Democratic Party's stance on the issues smells just as sweet by any name.

Richard Poskozim can be reached at poskozim.1@osu.edu.

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