I thank both of you for your comments.

Mr. Wong, I had similar feelings. Both things excited me: that he was black and that he had a “foreign sounding” name and he never felt the necessity to run as Barry O’Barra or some such.

I grew up with Roy Scherer having to become Rock Hudson to be an actor and John Mellencamp having to be Johnny Cougar and Ricardo Valenzuela having to become Richie Valens. At least Elvis Presley was able to have success while keeping his somewhat off the beaten path name.

When I was making my way as an elected judge in Texas, another Austin Municipal Court judge tried for a promotion on exactly the same career path I was on starting before we became judges — he had the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council grant to serve farm workers in the Rio Grande Valley the year before I did and his Bar approval numbers on the Municipal Court were higher than mine. Still, I was elected and he was not.

Steve Russell is a better political name than Nigel Gusdorf, but Nigel deserved promotion as much as I did if not more. How much better? My name was good for 15 percent of voters who knew nothing about me. I shed my birth name, Stephen Teehee, for reasons having nothing to do with politics — but that decision changed my life. This would be a collateral reason I was rooting for a guy named Barack Obama who kept his birth name and did not even retreat to his familiar nickname, Barry.

So, yes, I thought Obama’s election was a milestone in the struggle against racism but also against xenophobia.

If you had told me that a failed real estate guy could begin a political career peddling the crackpot theory that Obama was really born in Kenya — presumably because his graduate student mother had more confidence in Kenyan medical care when she was pregnant with her first child? — and his parents hopped in a time machine and realized he could be the first black POTUS, so they planted fake birth announcements in the Hawaiian newspapers… It’s so nutty that just to write it down would bring on a laughing fit if Mr. Trump had not done so much damage in addition to rolling back the clock on racism and xenophobia.

Mr. Wong, I was in the same place you were in…and now I find myself holding on to the last few slivers of rationality in public discourse and hoping against hope that Mr. Eierdam is wrong. But you will notice I don’t take him on directly. That’s because I am not confident that he’s wrong. I’ve seen too much crazy to rely on my instinctive recoil from crazy to predict an election outcome.