Hotmail spell-check associates Obama with Osama

HOTMAIL GLITCH | Dictionary offers 'Osama' as alternate word

For months, Barack Obama's campaign has repeatedly, and not always successfully, tried to swat away references to Barack "Osama," the mutating of the candidate's name into the similar-sounding moniker of the world's most-wanted terrorist.

Some of the mix-ups have been made accidentally (as when Sen. Ted Kennedy did it). Some have been made maliciously by Obama's critics (as when Rush Limbaugh did it).

One mix-up, with potentially vast effect, apparently belongs to the unintentional category and gained wide currency this week: The spell-checker in Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail software recommends that users replace the word "Obama" with "Osama."

The glitch, which a Microsoft spokeswoman said the company is trying to fix, was brought to light this week by Minnesota political adman Bill Hillsman, who said the e-mail wrinkle "opens a whole can of worms again that the Obama campaign desperately wants to stamp out."

Obama's exotic-sounding name (not least, his middle name, Hussein) has caused headaches for the candidate and his aides as they've tried to correct misconceptions about his heritage -- including that he's a closet Muslim.

A Google search of "Obama Osama" returns more than 400,000 hits. And with an estimated 260 million users of Hotmail worldwide, Hillsman said such an error could perpetuate those misconceptions.

"Self-identified independent voters are most likely to be influenced by this," said Hillsman, a partner in a political consulting firm that focuses on independent candidates and voters. "Democrats and Republicans aren't going to be swayed by this. But people e-mailing things back and forth about Obama are going to keep seeing this and if it happens enough times, they could make the wrong association."

Hillsman, whose ad campaigns for Minnesota politicians Paul Wellstone and Jesse Ventura shot him to prominence, said one of his partners stumbled across the glitch while "fooling around on the computer, looking for things independent voters might find online. We figured this was a mistake."

That's exactly what it was, according to Microsoft spokeswoman Melissa Lawson.

"For the convenience of our customers, Windows Live Hotmail spell checking functionality helps provide suggested alternatives for words not recognized by the Hotmail dictionary, including suggestions for other words or proper names similar in spelling to the unrecognized term," she wrote in an e-mail.

"While the Hotmail spell checker currently recognizes the term 'Barack,' it does not properly recognize the term 'Obama.' We are working to update the Hotmail dictionary to recognize 'Obama.'"