Robert: We have got to do another round on the use of first names in politics — whether it’s demeaning or intimate to refer to candidates that way (see first round here).

 

 Paula: I tend to think that some degree of consistency makes sense. If you call Obama, Barack, you should call McCain, John. Since that won’t work — John is just too common a name (though for some reason that didn’t get in the way of the occasonal references to “Bill”) — then I think they both need to go by their last names.

 

Robert: Why does it have to be symmetrical? I’m not sure about Barack, but for Godsakes, Hillary sounds so much better than Senator Clinton. Hillary Clinton is redundant: there are two Clintons in the world and only one Hillary. When you write “Hillary,” the world knows who you are writing about. This whole first-name thing came up surrounding Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. The media usually called Jackson by his first name, and I was angry about this and talked to my southern-born Negro mother about it. She paused a second and said: “That’s his name! That’s what he wants them to call him!” Of course, I later learned about how close Jackson was with all the media folks and also that’s what his black supporters called him. They would chant, “Jesse … Jesse …” — so despite the fact that using a first name of a black person had been a degrading southern practice, in this case, it wasn’t necessarily that. That’s my view of Hillary as well. Imagine the ticket: Hillary and Jesse! Do you think anyone in the world would not know exactly who we are referring to — and Hillary and Jesse is so much more alive and energetic than “Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson.”

 

Paula: But I’m not sure you’re being fair here. You want to decide whether the first name is used on your own terms — but if a white Southerner, one maybe whom you suspect of racism, were to refer to Jesse and then to McCain, you might well take this as an insult. That’s why I say that it’s best to create a standardized way of referring to candidates that won’t leave us open to potential misunderstanding. It reminds me of the rules that have cropped up for pc speech on college campuses. They often seem to go too far, but the premise is to try to be fair. I see the point that it may end up leaching away some of what is individual and poetical in our speech — but perhaps during this transitional stage in culture, that’s the price one must pay. As you note, there is the possible confusion between the two Clintons, but if she’d gotten the nomination it would have been clear that a reference to Clinton referred to her. Now, I think it’s best to refer to Hillary Clinton or to Bill Clinton. Maybe I’m being boring and doctrinaire, but I think it protects against possible abuse.

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