Saturday, September 20, 2008

could we vote a baldie into the oval office?


I just heard Robert Krulwich's segment about how Russians have had a pattern of having leaders with hair on top or not (Note: This phenomenon was after the Communists took power). Literally:


Nikita Khrushchev = bald
Leonid Brezhnev = hairy
Yuri Andropov = bald)
Konstantin Chernenko = hairy
Mikhail Gorbachev = bald
Boris Yeltsin = hairy
Vladimir Putin = very, very thin on top
Dmitry Medvedev = hairy

And there is a fun little jingle about this too.

So I was curious to see if we ever voted any baldies into the Presidency. And because like me, Time magazine, the serious source of news (ahem), queried whether Americans could vote a bald man into office. It turns out Americans only voted two proud, bald men: Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s and Martin Van Buren in 1836. Can Americans get beyond the shiny pate and see the inner beauty (or at least the inner political platform) and vote a bald person into office?

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