The US has had four left-handed presidents since 1974 — Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton
WASHINGTON: Regardless of whether Americans elect the 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 US 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% 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 only one in 10 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 visualizes 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,”wrote Wang and Aamodt.
“Lefties are over-represented among the mathematically talented and are more likely to find unexpected or counter-intuitive solutions on problem-solving tests. So maybe the number of left-handed presidents isn’t so surprising after all,” they said.
But with all those talents, one has to wonder why there weren’t that many left-handed presidents in the more distant past.
The answer, says the Washington Post, is because they all had left-handedness drummed out of them by teachers.
“For years, left-handedness was not treated as a point of pride, much less a qualification for high office,” wrote Wang and Aamodt.
“Remnants of anti-leftiness are everywhere... The words ‘adroitness’ and ‘dexterity’ derive from the French and Latin words for ‘right,’ while ‘gauche’ and ‘sinister’ derive from the words for ‘left.’
“In the New Testament, the souls of sinners who fail to meet with the Savior’s approval are sent to his left — and to eternal damnation. No wonder that, well into the 20th century, children who showed signs of left-handedness when writing were forced to switch hands.”
