Senate evidently remembers its job.

Burt Likko in reply to Mopey Duns says:

We don’t have a uniform style manual, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m not consistent myself. Sometimes it’s “the President” and sometime’s it’s “President Obama” and sometimes it’s “Barack Obama” and sometimes it’s “Mr. Obama” and sometimes it’s just “Obama.” I think any of those uses is well within the boundaries of appropriate means of reference. At the point he stops being President, it would no longer be appropriate to refer to him as “the President,” but “President Obama” would still be appropriate then, in honor of his past service in that office, or while discussion of something he did during that service. It’s entirely appropriate to refer to “President Bush” or “President Clinton” in the same light.

Use or reference to the incumbent President’s middle name, “Hussein,” can be inferred to imply a degree of insult and emphasis on otherness depending on context, but there are contexts in which it is simply recital of his full name. Generally, a President’s middle name isn’t particularly important and is ignored, except to distinguish Presidents whose names would otherwise be identical (George H.W. Bush from George W. Bush, John Adams from John Quincy Adams). Generally, if the remainder of the comment casts aspersion upon the President, I interpret the use of his middle name in that comment as pointing out otherness and thus at least bordering on an insult.

As I understand it, he called himself “Barry” as a young man in an attempt to fit in with peers, and after a time he realized that using his real name was a better idea, more dignified, and that his real friends either didn’t care what his real name was or preferred that he use his real name. Calling him “Barry” makes fun of that period in his life, a period in which he was a young man seeking belonging and friendship — which is why I find it a little galling that he be made fun of that way, because I went through such a phase before I found such self-confidence as I enjoy now, and I bet nearly everyone else reading this did at one point in their lives, too. I know I don’t enjoy it when someone even good-naturedly teases me about things from that point in my life and I bet nearly everyone else reading this has similar sorts of feelings about their own times of awkwardness and self-doubt — how much worse would such a thing be if it were not good-natured but instead aimed with intent to insult?

And if you heard someone aim such an insult at me, even though you personally were not the target, wouldn’t you feel awkward and upset on my behalf? Even if you were taking the intellectual side of a discussion in opposition to me, wouldn’t you think that the insult blended in to the other discussion was socially inappropriate and possibly even damaging to the point you wanted to make?

Add to that the fact that Birthers do indeed refer to the man as “Barry” not just for the purpose of mocking him but to suggest that he lied about what his name was, and that the purpose of the lie was to escape detection and to “look American,” compounding the emphasis on his being “other” when the truth is that he is anything but “other.” His story is as American a story as my own. Blending “Barry” with Birtherism pushes him out of the American identity and makes him not just Other Than American, but an Enemy Of America. (Which, when associated with some other criticism of him, makes that criticism look like weaker ketchup than it would otherwise be.)

That’s why it’s not a good thing to call the President “Barry.” For anyone.

Perhaps our commenter above never thought about it that way before. If so, I hope he thinks about it now, and in the future finds a way to express references to the President that does not contain such an unnecessary insult. Somehow, for the rest of us, that’s a pretty easy maneuver to execute even when we’re criticizing him.Report