America loves the underdog story. We want to hear how out of the most improbable of circumstances rose the greatest of victors. This is an American story: to find glory in the dimmest chances. We see it play out in presidential politics, in the very founding of our country, in literature, music, even branding. In 2010, Harvard Business Review published the article “Capitalizing on the Underdog Effect,” highlighting a study where consumers were given the choice between two different chocolate brands. The article explains, “One brand had an underdog story: We described it as small and new, competing against powerhouses like Lindt and Godiva. The other brand had a top-dog biography, characterized by experienced founders and a big marketing budget. The result: 71% of subjects chose the underdog chocolate.” The more consumers related to the underdog story themselves – historically marginalized groups such as “women, blue collar workers, ethnic minorities” – the stronger their alignment with the underdog brand.

What is it that makes us prefer a certain chocolate because of the businessperson’s journey to make the chocolate? Is it reclamation of our own personal hardships as springboards to success? Is our own “underdoggedness” actually fertile ground for our greatest growth? Or is it just a band-aid we give ourselves to accept the unmerciful casting of “a person in adversity or in a position of inferiority” as the dictionary describes?

In the impending presidential election, each candidate is vying to be the underdog, and each can claim it in different ways. In October of 2011, George Stephanopoulos asked President Barack Obama if he considered himself an underdog in the campaign to reelection, and the president said without hesitating, “Yes. Absolutely.” One could argue that Obama’s history unequivocally makes him an underdog.  A son of a single mother, odds against him, becomes the leader of the free world. Unlike his opponent, Mitt Romney, who, despite his privileged background, has also touted the coveted title of underdog, as every challenger to an incumbent has the ability to do. There is something so American about the branding of candidates as underdogs. It’s the story we want to hear, especially coming out of a recession and feeling like underdogs ourselves. We want someone to relate to, we want to see the restored vision for our own lives played out so that we can believe in it. As the late Democratic Governor Happy Chandler once said, “We Americans are a peculiar people. We are for the underdog, no matter how much of a dog he is.”

There are really two parts to the underdog story – first, the odds stacked against her, and then, her glorious victory. We love the journey from part one to two. We can look to the Revolutionary War as an historical context for the underdog story. Americans were set to lose – no navy, no military, no economy, no odds. However, as stacked as the British may have been in military, skill, training, and resources, there is a great distinction between those who want to fight and those who need to fight. This is the grit of the underdog – the American inspiration was the idea of a free country. The hope of the future was more compelling than the odds of the present. Americans did not win the war on sheer motivation alone (the French had a little something to do with it), but it was the one tool Great Britain did not have in its chest.

As a people, when the odds are not in our favor is when we perform the best, become the most innovative, creative, determined. Perhaps even the Great Recession has only been the groundwork for what will prove to be the most productive time in American history. The bipartisan and often vitriolic rhetoric we have become accustomed to in the past decade could turn out to be the rock bottom we need to strengthen our democracy – not because we embrace it, but because we once again learn that the humility that results from a broken practice gives us crystallized insight. That’s the gift of the underdog. We can only shift when we have finished falling and reached that hard-learned lesson at the bottom.

Via Wiki Commons.

I first heard that “Isaac may cause some devastation” over a week ago and it was startling. My son, like most toddlers, is capable of creating a little mayhem, but I was certain he was not planning anything to concern the national media.

Storm predictions indicate his name won’t become synonymous with massive death and destruction—this year. So “Isaac” will almost stay in the rotation of Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane names, and get another crack at weather infamy sometime in 2018, when my son will be 8.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher and editor of The Nation, wrote soon after her namesake hurricane of 2005 that “it has been eerie hearing and reading my name all over the news.”

At the end of the year, Time asked her about any “personal consequences” to being an outspoken liberal commentator, and the only thing she mentioned was the “very personal and mean way” Rush Limbaugh called the deadly event “Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel.” The cruel nickname persists to this day in the rightwing blogosphere.

And although “Barry” Obama could suffer the same fate next year, conservative leaders are also vulnerable. Chris Christie and Karl Rove escaped making big hurricane news this year, but their names will be back in the hopper with my son in 2018. William Kristol lives with the daunting double whammy of a possible Hurricane William this year and then Bill in 2015.

The United Nations’ all-powerful and historically sexist naming body (female hurricane names were used exclusively until 1979), the World Meteorological Organization, tends to like short names, but nevertheless Paul Ryan. John Boehner, and Mitt Romney are safe from being connected with devastation, at least until a hurricane starting with P, J or M is so catastrophic that the name is retired and replaced.

As for the name Katrina, nameberry.com, a popular site for expectant parents, says simply “the hurricane blew this one out of the realm of possibility.” The name’s popularity dropped precipitously starting in 2006 but surprisingly it wasn’t until last year that it fell out of the top 1,000 of female US names, according to the Social Security Administration

To quote many politicians, it doesn’t have to be this way. Hurricanes and tropical storms do need names since they move rapidly and are often active simultaneously, but there’s no reason to connect them to hundreds of millions of real people.

The World Meteorological gods could opt for things like Greek letters, alpha, beta, etc., but the better choice would be to take fictional villains. Hollywood, comics and other pop culture sources provide an endless supply. Spider-Man alone is a gold mine of names, my favorites being Boomerang, Hammerhead, Jackal and Carnage. Simon is a real name that should be used since Simons already share with the villains of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Underdog (Legree and Bar Sinister). Underdog also gives us Riff Raff.

Bane, Batman’s nemesis, is another good one, although that one should wait for whenever Romney leaves active politics, perhaps as late as 2021. That would get Bill Kristol off the hook.

Josh Rogers is a NYPress.com columnist. Follow him @joshrogersnyc.