H ow would Barack Obama fare in the 2008 election if he were named Barry Dunham?
Had Obama continued to use the Americanized version of his first name as he did in Hawaii as a child — Barry — and, like many other very young children of broken homes, taken his mother’s maiden name — Dunham — his path would have no doubt been different.
Barry Dunham might be the name of a social worker in Waikiki who teaches a couple of classes down the road at Kapiolani Community College.
But if Obama had arrived on the political scene with the same force, gifts and keen instincts, but an Anglo-American name, one would assume that his task of introducing himself to the nation’s swing voters would be a lot easier.
We shouldn’t overlook the lyric power of Obama’s name. Once remembered, it is hard to forget. You only need to hear an ecstatic crowd of 10,000 repeating “Ba-rack-O-bama” for a moment to understand that.
But packing a hall with chanting devotees is one thing. Convincing residents of southern Ohio that you are a safe bet in uncertain times is quite another.
Barry Dunham would surely evoke less concern about shared origins and purposes in the swing states than Ba-rack-O-bama does.
And there you have the mystery that will be solved by voters: How willing are Middle Americans, Southerners and Westerners to embrace the candidate who represents the most radical cultural departure in the nation’s political history?
While many cast this year’s election as a referendum on American racial attitudes, it is culture, as it almost always is, that really counts.
Americans would certainly be ready to elect a black president if he were of the traditional cultural mold. A multicultural president, though, would be a demographic quantum leap.
As Thomas Sowell points out in his potent book on race in America, “Black Rednecks and White Liberals,” there is much common culture between black Americans and the descendants of the poor whites who left the South to push the nation westward. While black-white relations have been the deepest wound in the national body politic, American whites and blacks have shared the same space and institutions for some 16 generations. And after 40 years of equal political access, a black president hardly sounds far-fetched.
It’s easy to imagine that in this Democratic year, a black candidate like former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee (if he hadn’t been nipped in his 2006 Senate run) being very palatable to Bush-weary Democrats across Appalachia and into the Rust Belt.
Obama’s greatest challenge is not be being black. It is being a cultural oddity.
This is, after all, a nation that has seen its biggest cultural shifts among presidents come in Andrew Jackson, a Scots-Irish war hero who rallied support among the hardscrabble voters in new Western states, and John Kennedy, an Irish Catholic who represented the culmination of 140 years of work by America’s most politically industrious group of immigrants.
Even Kennedy, though, was by demeanor and upbringing from the same patrician class that has usually held the presidency.
Over the span of 43 presidents and 210 years, American voters have selected a remarkably homogeneous lot. They have all been white males, certainly, but even on small details you’d have to go to an SEC frat party to find a more similar group of guys.
When you consider that the presidency has seen a dozen Episcopalians, seven Presbyterians, one Catholic, a generic “Christian” (Abraham Lincoln) and the rest a mixed bag of various regional Protestant faiths, you’re only scratching the surface of similarity.
Major changes, like the election of the first Scots-Irish Presbyterian in Jackson or the first Irish Catholic in Kennedy, came after the rise of their own demographic groups.
Other breakthroughs, like the first president of obvious German origins, Dwight Eisenhower, was barely noticed. (Herbert Hoover was a German-American, but his family ditched its original surname, Huber.)
But whether they were patricians ruling from obligation, buckskinned frontiersmen climbing their way to the top, war heroes returning to serve or products of political machines, presidents have all fallen into one well-known cultural category or another.
President Barry Dunham would be adding just one more well-known American group to a slowly evolving presidential history.
But President Barack Obama, especially when coming under a banner of sweeping change, would be revolutionary.
