白领英语晨读经典365 049　Short Name With Presidents　总统的短名字

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What's the big question US presidential candidates should be asking themselves? Is my name short enough?

You only have to glance at the credits on a Hollywood movie to see the polysyllabic, ethnic diversity of surnames in the great melting pot of the United Statets. But when it comes to voting for a president, the gene pool shrinks rapidly, and the preference is for monikers that are blunt and Anglo-Saxon. So if you want to find a way of forecasting who is going to win the race for the presidency, look at the lengths and origins of their names.

The pattern since World War II has been for candidates with increasingly short, poster-friendly names. And preferably sounding like they could be the lead characters in a mini-series. In the last electoral battle, in 2000, the names couldn't have got any shorter, with a two-syllable play-off between George Bush and AI Gore. Perhaps the Republicans have already rumbled this short-name advantage.

In the three decades since Richard Nixon was turned out of office, Ronald Reagan has been the only Republican candidate with a surname longer than one syllable. Coincidence?

This hasn't always been successful. Bill Clinton also has the distinction of being one of only two presidents to have beaten rivals with fewer syllables in their name. The other was Jimmy Carter, who beat Gerald Ford, in the far from usual circumstances following Watergate.
译文：

美国总统候选人应该问自己的最重要的问题是什么呢？那就是：我得名字足够短吗？你只要瞥一眼好莱坞的电影明星，就不难发现在美国这个大熔炉里有许多来自不同种族的多音节姓氏。但是，轮到选举总统时，候选人的基因库就迅速缩小，那些简单明了的古英语中的名字最容易收到青睐。所以，如果你想找出一种方法来预测谁将会赢得总统竞选，看看他们名字的长短和来源吧。

第二次世界大战以来，候选人的名字越来越短，而且要在广告上看起来亲切。最好听上去像电视短剧中主角的名字。在上次选举站中，也就是2000年的总统大选中，总统候选人的名字已经短得不能再短了，乔治.布什和阿尔.戈尔之间展开了双音节姓名的最后决赛。或许共和党人已经发现了名字简短的优势。在理查德.尼克松被赶出白宫之后的30年间，罗纳德.里根是唯一一个姓氏超过一个音节的共和党候选人。这难的是巧合？

但是，名字简短的候选人也并不总能是能够获得成功。只有两位总统战胜了姓氏所含音节比自己少的竞争者，比尔.克林顿有幸成为其中的一位：另一位是吉米.卡特，水门事件后，在及其不同寻常的情况下，他打败了杰拉尔德.福特成为美国总统。