Apolitical Presidential Campaign Observation
I think it's unfortunate that the first serious female candidate for President shares a last name with a recent and controversial former President and, thus, apparently felt the need to distance her own campaign from his name. Hillary Clinton's campaign motto/slogan/graphical image reads "Hillary for President," and a piece of campaign material I got in the mail urges "CHANGE AMERICA. VOTE HILLARY." This use of her first name, IMO, makes her campaign look like it lacks a certain amount of seriousness (oh wait! wouldn't this be the perfect time to use the word "gravitas," my favorite pretentious term these days?), not to mention gender equality with the other candidates. Or perhaps the explorer has come back from the dead and decided to enter politics and run for U.S. President, which, of course, he wouldn't be allowed to do, due his not being born in the U.S.--which, IMO, is a stupid rule.
Digression warning:
A citizen should be a citizen, and the rule should be dumped even if it leads the Governator to the White House. A stupid law is a stupid law and should be eliminated even if the immediate results would be unfortunate. Although, frankly, while I'm no fan of him as a politician, and hearing Ahhhnold's voice talking governor-talk always gives me a major case of cognitive dissonance (all I can really hear is "Fuck You!" and "Hasta La Vista, Bay-bee!"), I actually think he would have been a better (or less bad) President than Dubya, whose father, I bet, must always have to apologize about him, even among fellow Republicans.
When I was teaching, I had to drum into my students that female writers get referred to by their last names just as male writers do, and I'd always get peeved by essays on 19th c. American poetry, for instance, that referred to the poets, "Whitman" and "Emily." For that matter, when it came to the Shelleys, I wouldn't accept "Shelley" and "Mary," but told students that they'd have to use an egalitarian way of distinguishing between them if writing about both in the same essay. For instance, after referring to "Percy Bysshe Shelley" and "Mary Shelley" in one's introduction, using "Percy" and "Mary" in the essay seems the least awkward way to refer to them in the rest of the paper, in which case, in my intro (if I were writing about both), I'd use "Percy Bysshe Shelley (henceforth, 'Percy'" and "Mary Shelley (henceforth, 'Mary'"). Of course, you have the same problem if writing about more than one Brontë sister in the same paper, but again I'd use first and last names in the intro and then first names in the rest of the paper.
Anyway, I haven't seen any Edwards materials that urge "Vote John" and Obama's website is "Obama for America." I don't think Senator Clinton had much choice, but, hey, that's another reason women shouldn't change their names when they get married. :-) I would have never had such a problem (and, in fact, one kid has their dad's last name and one has mine, and their dad had no objection when I first proposed doing it this way).
At any rate, I've never had a political ambition in my life except when I ran for Vice-President of the English Dept's grad students' club at UCLA. I think my most demanding duty was arranging for a group of my friends to get together and bring their favorite LP's (yes, LP's) so we could make a mix tape for the "Welcome New Grad Students" party. One friend had a fader dealie so we even could have one song fade out as the next faded in. God, those were great tapes--a real snapshot of the tastes of English grad students in the mid-80's: lots of Talking Heads in particular but a whole range from the Who to Prince ("1999" and "Purple Rain") to Bob Marley. I did get to attend one department meeting in place of the President and got to see the complete contempt many faculty members had for students, when one Prof made a comment about grad students just wanting to do the least amount of work possible, and I thought, "What the fuck? It's not as though we were forced to go to grad school in English or thought it would lead to lucrative careers. We could have gone to law school instead and exceeded your salary very quickly." Well, that's not an exact quote of what I was thinking, but the content is accurate. Man, I was pissed. I think I said something more polite in objection to his comment, but it was really hard not to be more sarcastic. So much for my political career.
Digression warning:
A citizen should be a citizen, and the rule should be dumped even if it leads the Governator to the White House. A stupid law is a stupid law and should be eliminated even if the immediate results would be unfortunate. Although, frankly, while I'm no fan of him as a politician, and hearing Ahhhnold's voice talking governor-talk always gives me a major case of cognitive dissonance (all I can really hear is "Fuck You!" and "Hasta La Vista, Bay-bee!"), I actually think he would have been a better (or less bad) President than Dubya, whose father, I bet, must always have to apologize about him, even among fellow Republicans.
When I was teaching, I had to drum into my students that female writers get referred to by their last names just as male writers do, and I'd always get peeved by essays on 19th c. American poetry, for instance, that referred to the poets, "Whitman" and "Emily." For that matter, when it came to the Shelleys, I wouldn't accept "Shelley" and "Mary," but told students that they'd have to use an egalitarian way of distinguishing between them if writing about both in the same essay. For instance, after referring to "Percy Bysshe Shelley" and "Mary Shelley" in one's introduction, using "Percy" and "Mary" in the essay seems the least awkward way to refer to them in the rest of the paper, in which case, in my intro (if I were writing about both), I'd use "Percy Bysshe Shelley (henceforth, 'Percy'" and "Mary Shelley (henceforth, 'Mary'"). Of course, you have the same problem if writing about more than one Brontë sister in the same paper, but again I'd use first and last names in the intro and then first names in the rest of the paper.
Anyway, I haven't seen any Edwards materials that urge "Vote John" and Obama's website is "Obama for America." I don't think Senator Clinton had much choice, but, hey, that's another reason women shouldn't change their names when they get married. :-) I would have never had such a problem (and, in fact, one kid has their dad's last name and one has mine, and their dad had no objection when I first proposed doing it this way).
At any rate, I've never had a political ambition in my life except when I ran for Vice-President of the English Dept's grad students' club at UCLA. I think my most demanding duty was arranging for a group of my friends to get together and bring their favorite LP's (yes, LP's) so we could make a mix tape for the "Welcome New Grad Students" party. One friend had a fader dealie so we even could have one song fade out as the next faded in. God, those were great tapes--a real snapshot of the tastes of English grad students in the mid-80's: lots of Talking Heads in particular but a whole range from the Who to Prince ("1999" and "Purple Rain") to Bob Marley. I did get to attend one department meeting in place of the President and got to see the complete contempt many faculty members had for students, when one Prof made a comment about grad students just wanting to do the least amount of work possible, and I thought, "What the fuck? It's not as though we were forced to go to grad school in English or thought it would lead to lucrative careers. We could have gone to law school instead and exceeded your salary very quickly." Well, that's not an exact quote of what I was thinking, but the content is accurate. Man, I was pissed. I think I said something more polite in objection to his comment, but it was really hard not to be more sarcastic. So much for my political career.