If you're an ambitious young rookie United States Senator from Illinois without military or executive experience or a record of significant legislative accomplishment hell-bent on winning the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination by passionately preaching the sugary political gospel of hope and change and receiving 90% of the black vote against Senator Hillary Clinton without non-white voters noticing that you are hugely disproportionately popular with black voters, it IS much better to be known as Barack Obama than Barry O'Bama, to be half-black instead of all white and to be male instead of female.

Geraldine A. Ferraro candidly admitted that if she had been a man named Gerald Ferraro, she would not have been chosen to be the 1984 Democrat vice presidential candidate.

In contrast, the Obama campaign becomes apoplectic when it is suggested, as Mrs. Ferraro recently did, that Barack Hussein Obama's race and gender are working for him in his race with Hillary Rodham Clinton for the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination.

Let's be real.

Barack went by Barry as a high school student in Hawaii.

If Barry O'Bama, a white man of Irish ancestry, had been the President of the Harvard Law Review, moved to Chicago to live and work, married another Harvard Law School graduate, had a couple of daughters, and won a United States Senate seat after losing a race for Congress and serving a couple of terms in the Illinois state senate, would he have been one of the final two in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination against a former First Lady of the United States serving her second term as a United States Senator from New York and still married to the only Democrat president to win re-election since Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

Even if he had the eloquence of the late Dr. Martin Luther King and the charisma of the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy (neither of whom was embarrassed by the mention of their middle names), no.

Oprah Winfrey would not have encouraged him to run for President, even if he sang better than Barack dances, and well-meaning people would have told him to accomplish something for the country first before trying to lead it.

Surely the mainstream media would have scrutinized him closely if his wife had written a college thesis proclaim that she put the Irish-American community "first and foremost."

Michelle Obama put the Black community "first and foremost" and only became really proud of America after America proved to be receptive to her husband's campaign.

Surely the mainstream media would have scrutinized him closely if it was known that he had dealings with a Syrian-born businessman under federal indictment for attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud.

Barack Obama's dealings with Tony Rezko deserve the closest scrutiny.

Surely the mainstream media would have widely reported his connections to Ireland, especially if he had a brother who was ant-American and a cousin who had been educated in Communist East Hermany and named his first-born Fidel who was runing for President of Ireland as the "Agent of Change" while he was doing the same in the United States.

Check out Barack's Kenyan connections, especially with his now Prime Minister cousin, Raila Odinga.

Surely the mainstream media would have scrutinized him closely if his favorite priest for twenty years had inspired him to write a book, married him and his wife and baptized their children had preached that God should damn America, America got what it deserved on September 11, 2001 and America created the HIV virus to destroy people of Irish ancestry.

The noxious Rev. Jeremiah Wright was Barack's chosen pastor for twenty years and Barack has yet to denounce him as an anti-American racist or described him as a mental case.

And surely the mainstream media would be checking for a connection between an "earmark" arranged by a Senator O'Bama and that Senator's wife's huge salary hike.

In 2006, Senator Obama requested $1,000,000 for the construction of a new hospital pavilion at the University Of Chicago.His wife Michelle was the hospital's vice president of community affairs. Her compensation from the University of Chicago Hospital increased from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the United States Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office.

National Review's Jim Geraghty: "Perhaps this is lacking the audacity of hope and succumbing to cynicism and all of that, but I just don't think that most people will believe that Barack Obama tried to steer a million dollars of taxpayer money to his wife's employer and that it was never discussed between husband and wife. Public opinion just doesn't give politicians the benefit of the doubt in circumstances like this."

The mainstream media made Obama a viable candidate by virtually treating the scrutinizing of him instead of accepting him at face value as wrong instead of right.

The possibility of an Obama presidency made a wonderful political correctness story, but, as with the Duke Hoax, it's best that the truth be known as soon as possible.