“We Are All Obama!!”

Some of Barack Obama’s idealistic young supporters are taking endorsement of the candidate to an eerie new level, one familiar to fans of the 1960 film, Spartacus, above, says The New York Times: They’re informally adopting his middle name, “Hussein,” to refute right-wingers who “use it to falsely assert that Mr. Obama is a Muslim or, more fantastically, a terrorist.” (Thanks, Afi Scruggs, for the tip.)

(In the Stanley Kubrick classic, fellow slaves all identify themselves as “Spartacus” when Roman soldiers come looking for the rebellious leader.)

The result is a group of unlikely-sounding Husseins: Jewish and Catholic, Hispanic and Asian and Italian-American, from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Okla., to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.

Jeff Strabone of Brooklyn now signs credit card receipts with his newly assumed middle name, while Dan O’Maley of Washington, D.C., jiggered his e-mail account so his name would appear as “D. Hussein O’Maley.” Alex Enderle made the switch online along with several other Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, and now friends greet him that way in person, too.

Says one adoptee,

“I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s name like it was some sort of cuss word,” Mr. Strabone wrote in a manifesto titled “We Are All Hussein” that he posted on his own blog and on dailykos.com.

So like the residents of Billings, Mont., who reacted to a series of anti-Semitic incidents in 1993 with a townwide display of menorahs in their front windows, these supporters are brandishing the name themselves.

“My name is such a vanilla, white-girl American name,” said Ashley Holmes of Indianapolis, who changed her name online “to show how little meaning ‘Hussein’ really has.”