A Bombay cat named Barack Obama at an event titled ‘Vote for your favourite DemoCat or RepubliCat’ in New York on Saturday. (Reuters)

Washington, Oct. 19: Meet Jeff Hussein Nelson. This is Cindy Hussein Rose. And this cat has had its name changed to Jaki Hussein Chan.

Changing middle names to “Hussein” is the latest rage in political correctness in America, with just over a fortnight to go for a presidential election that is increasingly favouring Barack Hussein Obama.

Supporters of Obama — whose little-used middle name is Hussein — say it is too cumbersome and time-consuming to have their middle names legally changed to Hussein.

So, in their thousands, Americans are changing their middle names to Obama’s own name on networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and creating new email addresses with “Hussein” in it somewhere.

In New York state, where Democrat Obama is leading over his Republican rival John McCain by 25 points in opinion polls, some Democrats have changed their signatures to “Hussein” and now sign credit card receipts as such.

The name change, which has acquired the dimensions of a popular movement, is in response to a switch by Republicans a few weeks ago to negative campaigning against Obama.

But so far the party’s effort to turn around its unfavourable showing in every opinion poll by suggesting that Obama is a Muslim has not paid dividends for McCain.

To be a Muslim in post-September 11, 2001, America is to invite instant suspicion everywhere. At airports across the US, for instance, passengers with Islamic names are invariably singled out for secondary security screening, although the authorities always pretend that people are selected at random.

Declaring his support for Obama today, former secretary of state Colin Powell, a Republican, addressed this issue although he did not mention Obama’s middle name.

Powell pointed out that whenever Obama is “accused” of being a Muslim, there are assertions from his camp that the presidential aspirant is, in fact, a Christian. The right answer, Powell said, should be: what if Obama is a Muslim! Why shouldn’t a Muslim aspire to be US President?

McCain’s unpredictable running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, has accused Obama of “palling around” with terrorists in rabble-rousing speeches in Republican strongholds in an effort to motivate the party’s conservative base, which considers their presidential nominee this year too liberal.

Palin’s incendiary speeches have prompted crowds to shout “kill him” and “off with his head” against Obama and to issue threats against the media covering Palin rallies whenever she accuses the media of being biased in favour of Obama.

A few instances of changing middle names to “Hussein” acquired the dimensions of a movement in recent weeks after Jeff Strabone of New York, one of those who now signs credit card receipts as “Hussein”, reasoned for name change on the popular website Daily Kos.

Strabone titled his manifesto “We Are All Hussein” after John F. Kennedy’s famous line in 1963 during the Berlin blockade when he made a speech in West Berlin and declared: “Ich bin ein Berliner (I am a Berliner).”

“I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s (middle) name like it was some sort of cuss word,” Strabone wrote. Car bumper stickers have also appeared in many US cities promoting the idea of a name change in some form to “Hussein”.

Obama himself waded into the issue recently at a fund-raiser in his hometown of Chicago after he spotted a friend and contributor wearing a name tag which read: Richard Hussein Fizdale.

“We are all Hussein,” Obama told the crowd at the fund-raiser.