I'm not saying that having a name like Smith or Thompson or Hernandez is an express ticket to a carefree life. And the issue isn't ethnicity and its attendant cultural baggage. I'm just saying that having to spell out your name to every customer service agent, doctor's office receptionist and restaurant reservation taker you come into contact with can, depending on how many dinner reservations you make, add up to weeks or even months of your life you can never get back. And don't get me started on the humiliation of helplessly standing by while someone else butchers your name. As someone who has picked up the phone and heard a telemarketer say "Hello, Miss Doom?" at least 500 times, I'm here to say that even short names can render the most highly trained "courtesy specialist" functionally illiterate.

Some of Smith's findings are consistent with my own assumptions, that the soothing effect of names that juxtapose hard and soft sounds -- Truman and Reagan, for example -- have an advantage with voters over other kinds of names. But, in an interview with the Seattle Times in March, Smith said he'd 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 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.)

Smith says his method is 84% accurate in predicting who we vote for in presidential elections. The last time he was wrong was when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry, whose name had scored much higher. Single-syllable names, Smith says, tend to be less favored. As for first names, he says they're usually statistically negligible. (That must have been good news for Millard Fillmore.)

Fair enough. But as a member of the uncommon name tribe, I still find it hard to believe that American voters are capable of electing someone who's name doesn't sound like an industrial park. Sure, "Obama" might be one apostrophe away from something resembling an Irish name, but it so happens that no one with an "O' " name has ever been elected president either.

Is it too late for Obama to change his name to 50 Cent? Lots of consonants there, and musical too!