O'Bama

This guy was wrong in predicting Kerry would win, so who knows? Meghan Daum cites a self-styled expert on winning presidential names:

But, in an interview with the Seattle Times in March, Smith said he had also detected a public fondness for Irish names like O'Malley and O'Neill. The name Obama, he said, "grades very much like O'Donnell." Furthermore, according to his calculations, Obama's name scores higher than John McCain's. (The name Clinton, perhaps not surprisingly, scores higher than Obama or McCain, but because Hillary Clinton branded herself largely by her first name, Smith factored her in as "Hillary," which scored below McCain.)

Hmm, so voters subliminally think he's Irish. People in Chicago keep trying to put the O on my last name too. But that's not necessarily a good thing around here.