I was right: Obama's influence on names

I predicted here that Obama's candidacy/presidency would prompt more black Americans to give their children traditional African names, and that this trend might extend to Americans of all ethnicities giving their children names borrowed from other cultures.

What's happening instead, already, as this NYT article reports, is that grown Obama supporters are giving themselves his middle name, Hussein, as their middle names, adopting it as a symbol of solidarity in the face of all the anti-Muslim hysteria about his background.

So far Obama's campaign has done an extremely good job of managing Obama's "brand."  Obama-sponsored memes ("Yes we can") have been extremely successful.  And a couple of (planned?) physical-gesture memes that started out looking potentially damaging (the Jay-Z brush-off, the terrorist fist jab) were swiftly picked up and championed by pop culture (no question, the fist-bump is the new high-five).

Obama's imagery is powerful.  And the reason it's so powerful is that it's impeccably, vertically unified.  The campaign's power comes from the bottom up, but its themes and aesthetic come from the top down.  People interact with that imagery in a grassroots way -- make their own posters, buttons, etc. -- but they're using as their raw material the Obama "look."  That look is incredibly well-thought-out and designed to look right, sound right, feel right -- so when it gets repeated and repeated as it trickles through culture, it all reinforces the Obama message.  

What doesn't work is for the grassroots to come up with a meme and force it upwards, because it will clash with Obama's visual and rhetorical aesthetic.  And Hussein clashes.  Although Obama's middle name is a part of his "brand" (part of his name/"brand name") whether he likes it or not, it's not been chosen as part of his brand messaging.  And so what these kids are doing becomes unintentionally subversive of what Obama's trying to do.  The main problem with their gesture isn't that it adds to the false association between Obama and Islam (because, although it does, Obama is already treading the line on offending Muslims), but that it picks apart Obama's image when what's clearly been working best for him is summing-up, generalizing, unifying.  And because it picks apart instead of generalizing, it distracts from the candidate, leading us away into a debate on religion and race between individuals instead of back toward Obama and the mass movement.