After Taft, the presidency was all business and no one had time for middle names (least of all Warren Harding, who understandably avoided use of "Gamaliel"). Anyway, no one was having much luck with them. William Jennings Bryan was a three-time presidential loser.

Then there was Herbert Hoover. His name was associated with every stinking aspect of the Great Depression. Shantytowns where the unemployed lived were called "Hoovervilles." The newspapers people slept under were "Hoover blankets." The opposums and rabbits vagrants ate in city parks were "Hoover steaks."

SO WHEN Franklin Delano Roosevelt won in 1932, he wasn't messing around with this businesslike two-name stuff. His fifth cousin/uncle-in-law Teddy had called himself TR, and the new Roosevelt thought that would be cool. But FR sounded a lot like "afar" or "fart," and he was an aristocrat, so he kept the "Delano."

When you get elected president four times, people start to imitate you. After FDR, everyone had to have three names. Harry S. Truman holds the distinction of being the only president to go by his middle initial and middle name at the same time. Dwight David Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard M. Nixon all used one or the other. ("Milhous," Nixon's middle name, sounded like another word for puke and looked misspelled anyway. But he had to be RMN--his autobiography is even called RMN--since FDR, JFK and LBJ had so much fun with their initials.)

Impeachment does not have a nice ring. In fact, people hated Nixon so much that no president has used middle names--or even initials--since. Not Gerry Ford or Jimmy Carter (who actually requested once that history books call him "Jimmy" and not James Earl) or Ronald Wilson Reagan.

And most certainly not George Herbert Walker Bush, whose parents forgot to stop at three.

SOMEHOW, Thomas Richard Harkin hopes to make this into some sort of campaign issue--he never refers to the president by anything short of all four names. (The New Republic joked that Harkin should be "Tom William Jennings Harkin," but I know two people who didn't get it.)

But it's not just Harkin who's being silly. In the anti-Washington, anti-aristocracy populism that defines presidential politics today, none of the candidates uses a middle name. Or an initial. In fact, they've even taken to truncating individual names. Have you ever heard of William Jefferson Clinton? (Or even William Clinton?) How about Joseph Robert Kerrey? Edmund Gerald Brown Jr.? Perhaps, Lawrence Douglas Wilder?

I say we start using middle names again. Let people's policies speak for their populism. Besides, The Crimson uses everybody's middle initial, and The Crimson is really cool.

Well, let's make room for one exception. Paul will do just fine, Paul Efthemios Tsongas.

Please don't make fun of John Ashley Cloud '93.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a great name. Warren Gamaliel Harding is not.