Never before has the middle name of a U.S. senator gained as much print coverage as that of Senator Barack Hussein Obama of Illinois. For the past several months the U.S. media has been obsessed with the potential connection between Mr. Obama and Islam even though he has adamantly declared his credentials as a Christian. The auditory similarity between "Obama" and "Osama" has led to all kinds of jokes and media slips that are quite revealing of the continuing apprehensions about Islam that so many citizens continue to feel across the land . Of course, the U.S. Congress now has a bona fide Muslim member, Keith Ellison, from the state of Minnesota, and his decision to take an oath on the Quran instead of the Bible created an uproar as well. However, the significance of Mr. Obama's ethnicity is far more consequential because of his national prominence. Obama is already the front-runner among the democratic candidates in terms of overall popularity, despite being dismissed by some conservatives as a political novice with "oddity appeal."

However, because of the political rumblings, the senator is being cornered into distancing himself from his ethnic roots and pandering to pristine patriotism. The mere possibility that he might have attended a madrassah (which means school in Arabic) in Indonesia at the tender age of six suddenly became more important than his Harvard law degree. In his recent book The Audacity of Hope, Obama presents a more secular cadence about his early years as follows: "During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both cases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin's call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was properly learning my multiplication tables."

While such a resolute commitment to objective knowledge on his mother's part may well be commendable, the exposure to foreign cultures and traditions which Obama experienced should always be considered an asset by all. Indeed, his familiarity with Islam, could be a means of improving America's strained relations with the Muslim world through empathy and erudition. Sadly the American political landscape is still not ready to break the glass ceiling for a truly multicultural candidate. In the last election, the complex African-Portugese lineage of Senator Kerry's wife Teresa Heinz Kerry became the talk of the town. At least as a result of the Kerry caper, a large number of my fellow Americans were able to locate Mozambique on a map.

Unfortunately, we are still living in a world where credentials are constantly being filtered through ethnically determined innuendoes. Beyond the platitudes of "diversity requirements" in U.S. colleges or corporate training programs, it is high time that multiculturalism becomes an essential credential for leadership rather than being a liability.

Dr. Saleem H. Ali is an Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning and Acting Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at University of Vermont.