The Consonant Gardener

I’ve been reading a lot lately about this guy Obama, as has everyone interested in politics. And even if you don’t care about politics, you can’t escape the constant recitation of his name and speculation about his presumed presidential intentions.

As you might expect, I like him a lot. (Sue me, I’m a liberal.) And I don’t have any big opinions or insights into his personality or prospects. But I did have this weird thought the other day:

Guess how many U.S. presidents’ last names have ended in a pronounceable vowell? (Told you it was a weird thought.)

The answer is one: John F. Kennedy, who also, I think it’s safe to say, is the closest we’ve had to an “ethnic” president. (He was Irish-Catholic, and felt compelled to give a speech promising that he wouldn’t take his marching orders from the Vatican.)

If the criterion broadens to include presidents whose last names ended in a vowell sound, we have three: James Monroe, William McKinley, and JFK.

Even if you include all the presidents whose last names ended in a vowell, pronounced or not, the list is still sparse: Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce make it a party of five.

The list of “final-vowell-sound last names” gets a little longer, and slightly more interesting, if you add in vice-presidents who didn’t later become presidents: Now you have Elbridge Gerry (the second of James Madison’s two veeps), Alben Barkley (Harry Truman’s guy), Hubert Humphrey (who lost a brutally close race to Richard Nixon in 1968), Spiro Agnew (Nixon’s veep, whose sole cultural contribution was adding the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism,” a line written by future New York Times columnist William Safire, to our national discourse), and of course Dick Cheney.

Of all these presidents and vice presidents, only Agnew (a son of Greek immigrants) and Kennedy qualify as “ethnic.”

We’ve had gifted non-WASPs rise through our political system, of course. Mario Cuomo was regarded as the Democratic frontrunner in 1992, before Clinton emerged. John Kerry got more than 60 million votes in 2004, although some of the attacks on him (“he looks French”) seemed to be based on the idea that the current president is “one of us” while the Catholic (and ethnically part-Jewish) Kerry is “one of them.”

I can’t tell you what any of this means, other than to suggest that Obama’s assumed candidacy is one of the longest of long shots in all American political history. Not only is his skin dark, but his first name rhymes with the country we’ve been to war with twice; his last name sounds like that of Public Enemy Number One; and his middle name, Hussein, is Arabic for “all the bad things that keep you awake at night.”

But 2008 might be the most anomalous presidential campaign in U.S. history. Obama and Hillary Clinton (first woman!) are assumed to lead the pack on the Democratic side. And Republican front-runners include Rudy Giuliani (Catholic, vowell sound in the final syllable, three marriages), John McCain (Irish last name, divorced, member of the Keating Five), and Mitt Romney (Irish last name, Mormon).

Out of all those, McCain is the most traditional choice. So even though he’s not my guy, if I were a betting man, I’d say the early money should be on him. Even if there were nothing else to recommend him, his does have the benefit of being a white male whose last name ends in a consonant.

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