Tom Oniro
21 November 2008
Yet another one! He is No 8 in 2008. US President-elect, Barack Obama, made history as the first time African American who will live in the White House.
But more outstanding, the Illinois senator- turned-world leader becomes the 8th left- handed president in the Oval Office.
Obama has continued the run of left-handed presidents for the Oval Office. Equally, had Obama's Republican rival John McCain been victorious, the US could still have had its 8th lefty president.
McCain is also left-handed.Remember his campaign gestures, for example, when saying: "My friends..." the left hand was always in the air when making a point to his supporters.
"While this year's presidential campaign has been marked by historic firsts, the nominations of senators McCain and Obama will renew one surprising trend: For the fifth [eighth] time in the last 35 years, America will have a lefty in the White House," The New York Sun, June 23, announced.
Both major party candidates are southpaws, the paper recalled, "contributing to a largely unexplained phenomenon that has vexed researchers and historians".Southpaws is a word derived from baseball.
The success of left-handers transcends ideology, especially when it comes to the US presidency. Since 1974, presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George W Bush Snr and Bill Clinton were left-handed. But before 1974, two presidents - James Garfield and Harry Truman - were left-handed.
Prior to the historic US elections, the UK Telegraph cried: "...writing with the 'wrong hand' can be a key attribute when it comes to making it to the Oval Office".
And believably so, Bill Clinton was the US's third straight left-handed president. George Walker Bush Jr, the outgoing president, is the first right-handed president since Jimmy Carter.
So the presidency of the US has been in the hands of lefties for 22 of the past 34 years, "during all but the Carter and George W. Bush Jr administrations", as known to Melissa Roth, who authored 'The Left Stuff: How the Left handed Have Survived and Thrived in a Right handed World'.
One theory to explain the success of left handers in politics, according to Roth, is that, at an early age, they recognised that they are different in a fundamental way from most of their peers. "Their difference might be treated as a positive or a negative, a 'creative' asset or a failure to adapt", she writes, "but either way, they are aware that they are 'special', and that's a trait psychologists find in many leaders".
The 22-year-trend shall be revived on January 20 when Obama takes the oath as the 44th and simultaneously the 8th left handed US president, thus joining one of the most elite clubs in the world; The Club of Left-Handed Presidents.
According to associatedcontent.com, once a rarity---there was only one left-handed president in the first 140 years of the republic, and he served for less than a year. It has now become commonplace: "Since the death of the right handed Franklin Delano Roosevelt near the end of World War II, five of the thirteen men who have been President have been lefties".
In American history, associatedcontent.com remembers, only three men who served as President were left-handed from the year 1789, when right-hander General George Washington became the country's first President, until 1974, when the left-handed Gerald Ford succeeded right-handed Richard Nixon to become the first unelected president in American History.
It adds that in the preceding 185 years, lefties were in power as chief executives and first magistrates of the republic for but 12 and one half years, which represented about 7 percent of the total.
"Perhaps that was fitting, as according to a 1996 report published by the Royal Society of London," says the website, "90 to 93percent of the human population is right-handed while between seven and 10 percent is left handed".
Interestingly, however, out of the seven left-handed men who served as presidents, five were Republicans. With Obama becoming the third lefty Democrat, will be the contradiction of the stereotype of the GOP or the Grand Old Party---another name for the Republican Party--- as being conformist and orthodox---at least physically.
And, therefore, James Garfield, the 20th president, a Republican, was the last sitting member of the House of Representatives to be elected president.
Fellow leftie, Gerald Ford, had been lifted from the House of the Vice Presidency before inheriting the Oval Office.
Garfield, who was the second president to be assassinated, served six and one-half months as the first magistrate of the republic.
His active time as president, however, was even shorter as he was shot on July 2, 1881, less than four months after being inaugurated as the 20th president of the US. He, however, lingered on for two months before dying on September 19, 1881.
Yet another leftie Republican had to become president, this time as the 31st president in the epoch of the world's Greatest Depression between 1929 and 1933.
Herbert Hoover, a perennial favourite along with Democrats, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, and fellow Republicans, Richard M. Nixon -all righties - was ranked as the worst president of the US. Hoover, it is claimed, sat on his hands -both left and right - while the country went through the initial agonies of the Great Depression.
He is arguably the most right wing of the leftie presidents, including Ronald Reagan.
He once held the honour of having the most honorary degrees bestowed on an individual since he managed to live to the ripe and tired age of 90, up until 1964, 31 years after this man [Hoover], one of the worst chief executives and first magistrates in American history, surrendered the White House to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the greatest president of the 20th Century.
Then in the Oval Office as the first leftie Democrat was Harry S Truman. As the 33rd US president between 1945 and 1953, Truman ascended to the presidency following the demise of the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt, arguably the most right wing President in the US history. This leftie was scored by lefties in his own political party for not being left wing enough.
The hard core lefties bolted from the Democratic Party in 1948, after Truman won nomination for a term in his own right, and coalesced in the Progressive Party around Henry Wallace, the man Truman had replaced as the FDR's Vice President.
That November of 1948, the leftie Truman beat leftie Wallace and the right's Thomas Dewey who was the Republican nominee, as well as the right wing racist Strom Thurmond, whose fellow hard-core, diehard, fire-breathing, pro-segregation Southern Democrats also fled Truman's Party to form the reactionary Dixiecrat Party.
At the end of his second administration, Harry Truman was the most unpopular president in American history in terms of approval ratings, though the rightie George Walker Bush Jr may soon take, or has already taken, that dubious distinction.
Again a leftie Republican went back to the White House in between 1974-1977 as the 38th US president. He was Gerald Ford. The rightie Lyndon Johnson, vied with FDR for the title of most left wing president, at least in terms of social legislation.
He famously remarked that Gerald Ford, the Republican minority leader in the House and member of the famous Warren Commission investigating the assassination of Lyndon Johnson's predecessor, John F. Kennedy, was so dumb he could not "fart and chew gum at the same time.
On assuming the presidency, comedians quipped that Ford had the White House physical plant audited by the Congressional Budget Office to ascertain whether it was true that the departing 'Tricky Dick' Nixon had stolen the ceremonial silverware.
In his near two and one half years as president, he exercised the presidential veto so often against a Democratic majority congress that he became known as 'The Veto Bandito', in homage to the Frito Bandito, the cartoon Mexican mascot of Fritos cornchips, banned during the 1970s in one of the first instances of political correctness.
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