Barack D. Obama Shaw is now on the California governor’s race ballot, and millions of mailed ballots have already put his name in front of voters. The Alameda candidate is running on homelessness, housing and cutting unnecessary spending.
That ballot name is what many Californians will notice first. It resembles former President Barack Obama’s, but Shaw said he legally changed his name to Barack D. Obama Shaw in 2013 and had it long before he ran for office. He was known as Cecil Shaw III in the military in the early 2010s, when he said fellow service members gave him the Obama nickname after he grew attached to the former president. Before that, people around him called him Denzel Washington.
Shaw, who hosts Alameda’s Got Talent at the Alameda Theater and teaches children to play music, said his path to the governor’s race grew out of a long personal history as much as a political one. He said that when he stood at attention in uniform and saw Obama’s picture on the wall, he felt pride. Obama, he said, made it possible for someone like him to become president, even though, as he recalled hearing at the time, many people believed that would not happen in their lifetime.
He cast his campaign as an extension of that belief in possibility. “My name represents Obama, Denzel, my father, my grandfather and myself is what it is,” Shaw said, adding that if people want the future to be better, they have to create it. He also said, “I’m the one that believes in myself and willing to take risks, that’s the only difference.”
The Obama name gives his campaign an immediate attention-grabber on ballots, but Shaw’s pitch is local and practical. He has lived in Alameda for years, and he said he loves the city, comparing it to Mayberry with Andy Griffith, except without the whistling. That same neighborhood reputation sits beside a statewide run aimed at one of California’s biggest problems: homelessness.
The friction is obvious enough. A candidate with a name that echoes a former president is now asking for the governor’s office, and voters seeing it on a ballot mailed within the last month may assume the name is the story. Shaw says it is not. He says the name is his, the change was made years ago, and the work in front of him is the same as ever: more housing, less waste, and a state that does more for people who are struggling.
What remains unanswered is how far that message travels once voters move past the name. The ballots are out, the race is underway, and Shaw will have to prove that the man behind the headline can earn support on the issues alone.
