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Journalism of Courage
Regardless of whether Americans elect Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama President in November, the man who takes up residency in the White House will be a lefty — at least in terms of the hand he favours.
He will follow in the footsteps of a slew of presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, who were left-handed.
The United States has had four left-handed presidents since 1974: Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, George H W Bush and Bill Clinton, the New York Sun noted recently.
Even the ranks of vice presidents or unsuccessful contenders for the White House are heavy with left-handers: Al Gore, Bob Dole, John Edwards and Ross Perot were all lefties, in hand terms if not all politically so.
The high ratio of left-handers who climb to the top of the political ladder is all the more baffling when one considers that only 10-12 per cent of Americans write with their left hands.
“Six of the 12 chief executives since the end of World War II will have been left-handed: Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton and either Obama or McCain,” wrote two right-handed scientists, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, in the Washington Post on Sunday.
“That’s a disproportionate number, considering that only one in 10 people in the general population is left-handed,” they wrote.
The reason might be that left-handed people use the right side of the brain more, and that’s the side that visualises the whole of a problem, is more capable of multi-tasking and even shows greater creativity, wrote the New York Daily News.
“Many artists and great political thinkers were lefties — Pablo Picasso and Benjamin Franklin, for example,” wrote Wang and Aamodt.
