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Trouble is my middle name
My political "beat" is the U.S. Senate. I got interested in it many years ago and have kept it up. I have a database of every person who's ever served in the U.S. Senate, plus the Confederate Senate for that matter.
Looking at this year's election results, I notice
When I first compiled my Senate database many years ago, I thought it would be nice and clean if I used each senator's full legal name. In most cases this was not difficult to get. I gloried in such ornate old-time senatorial monikers as Xenophon Pierce Wilfley and Furnifold McLendel Simmons. (Simmons, a Democrat from North Carolina, was a Senate power in his day, and his name appears in most political histories of the Woodrow Wilson era, but has there ever been another human being with the first name of Furnifold?)
When the historical offices of the houses of Congress cleaned up their biographical database for the bicentennial of Congress in 1989, name research became even easier for historical figures. In 1947-66 there was a senator from Virginia called A. Willis Robertson, now forgotten except for having lifted his son Pat (the future evangelist) out of combat duty in Korea. A young reporter named Adam Clymer (he whom GWB later famously called "major league ***hole" on an open mike) became obsessed with that "A." What did it stand for? No reference sources revealed it, and Robertson refused to say. Clymer set out in search of the senator's birth certificate, and found it: Absalom. It got in the Congressional bioguide in 1989.
In recent years, though, it's gotten harder to get this information. Politicians (and others) are less and less likely to put their full names even in formal reference sources like Who's Who. Additions to the Congressional bioguide have gotten unbelievably incomplete and sloppy. I've never had the gall to phone D.C. and ask a secretary for the senator's name, and hunting down elusive birth certificates seems extreme for me. Searching for the names of new senators, I turn first to the Gale Biography Master Index, a pay database I access through my public library. Wikipedia is also good, and I've found it reliable in these matters. College alumni directories are really good, if you can get them. Various political biography sites and campaign finance databases have a lot of full names: I'm especially fond of The Political Graveyard. But for every Full Name A that Database 1 has, it won't have Full Name B, and if Database 2 has Full Name B, it won't have Full Name A.
Then there's Google. Finding the unknown middle name of a public figure, even if it's out there, is harder than it might seem. Take the new senator from Georgia, Johnny Isakson. Fortunately there aren't many famous people out there named Isakson. One of the candidates in Louisiana this year was named John Kennedy. First off, I didn't know if "Johnny" was Isakson's legal name. In the South, it sometimes is. But I decided to assume it wasn't. I also had to assume that John itself wasn't his middle name. My first Google search looked like this:
I got the names of all of this year's winners - I've still struck out on a few from the last two election cycles - but the toughest one was Barack Obama. The Gale index has "Barack A. Obama". The Google trick turned up a few listings for "Barack H. Obama", but any indication of what the H. stood for was not easily found. Then I tried "Barack H. Obama" as a phrase search, just to see if any clues would emerge. On the second page was a blog hit whose context quote read, "I can't find anything online that spells out the middle name of Barack H. Obama, and it seems there may be a reason..." I followed it. Oh boy. Further searching proved it: Barack Obama Jr. - who was, remember, named for his Kenyan father - has the middle name of Hussein. Pure coincidence - Obama, let alone his father, was born long before Saddam Hussein was ever heard of - but how embarrassing. In a world where rumors sweep that John Kerry changed his middle name so he'd have the initials JFK - it isn't true; he always had those initials - this could be a real liability.
By the way, look at this news story about new senators. It has Obama's exceedingly rare full name, but it doesn't give the easily-found full name of Tom Coburn, which is in the Congressional bioguide. See what I mean?
Looking at this year's election results, I notice
- Incumbency still rules. Every incumbent running won re-election, except for Daschle. This is typical. Wipe-outs are rare: I think the last major one was in 1980.
- Five Democrats retired, all in the South, and were all replaced by Republicans.
- Three Republicans retired, and the two who were not in the South were both replaced by Democrats.
When I first compiled my Senate database many years ago, I thought it would be nice and clean if I used each senator's full legal name. In most cases this was not difficult to get. I gloried in such ornate old-time senatorial monikers as Xenophon Pierce Wilfley and Furnifold McLendel Simmons. (Simmons, a Democrat from North Carolina, was a Senate power in his day, and his name appears in most political histories of the Woodrow Wilson era, but has there ever been another human being with the first name of Furnifold?)
When the historical offices of the houses of Congress cleaned up their biographical database for the bicentennial of Congress in 1989, name research became even easier for historical figures. In 1947-66 there was a senator from Virginia called A. Willis Robertson, now forgotten except for having lifted his son Pat (the future evangelist) out of combat duty in Korea. A young reporter named Adam Clymer (he whom GWB later famously called "major league ***hole" on an open mike) became obsessed with that "A." What did it stand for? No reference sources revealed it, and Robertson refused to say. Clymer set out in search of the senator's birth certificate, and found it: Absalom. It got in the Congressional bioguide in 1989.
In recent years, though, it's gotten harder to get this information. Politicians (and others) are less and less likely to put their full names even in formal reference sources like Who's Who. Additions to the Congressional bioguide have gotten unbelievably incomplete and sloppy. I've never had the gall to phone D.C. and ask a secretary for the senator's name, and hunting down elusive birth certificates seems extreme for me. Searching for the names of new senators, I turn first to the Gale Biography Master Index, a pay database I access through my public library. Wikipedia is also good, and I've found it reliable in these matters. College alumni directories are really good, if you can get them. Various political biography sites and campaign finance databases have a lot of full names: I'm especially fond of The Political Graveyard. But for every Full Name A that Database 1 has, it won't have Full Name B, and if Database 2 has Full Name B, it won't have Full Name A.
Then there's Google. Finding the unknown middle name of a public figure, even if it's out there, is harder than it might seem. Take the new senator from Georgia, Johnny Isakson. Fortunately there aren't many famous people out there named Isakson. One of the candidates in Louisiana this year was named John Kennedy. First off, I didn't know if "Johnny" was Isakson's legal name. In the South, it sometimes is. But I decided to assume it wasn't. I also had to assume that John itself wasn't his middle name. My first Google search looked like this:
John Isakson -"John Isakson"That's when I found that Google, trying to be oh so helpful, now searches for approximations with the same priority as what you actually type, so I got all the "Johnny Isakson" sites and had to modify my search to
John Isakson -"John Isakson" -JohnnyThis kind of thing can become a nuisance in more complicated cases if you run up against Google's ten-word search-term limit, and what if a page used both names? Fortunately in this case a campaign finance database popped up. He's John Hardy Isakson, and a phrase search directly on that name turned up a solid number of hits.
I got the names of all of this year's winners - I've still struck out on a few from the last two election cycles - but the toughest one was Barack Obama. The Gale index has "Barack A. Obama". The Google trick turned up a few listings for "Barack H. Obama", but any indication of what the H. stood for was not easily found. Then I tried "Barack H. Obama" as a phrase search, just to see if any clues would emerge. On the second page was a blog hit whose context quote read, "I can't find anything online that spells out the middle name of Barack H. Obama, and it seems there may be a reason..." I followed it. Oh boy. Further searching proved it: Barack Obama Jr. - who was, remember, named for his Kenyan father - has the middle name of Hussein. Pure coincidence - Obama, let alone his father, was born long before Saddam Hussein was ever heard of - but how embarrassing. In a world where rumors sweep that John Kerry changed his middle name so he'd have the initials JFK - it isn't true; he always had those initials - this could be a real liability.
By the way, look at this news story about new senators. It has Obama's exceedingly rare full name, but it doesn't give the easily-found full name of Tom Coburn, which is in the Congressional bioguide. See what I mean?