Looking at Language

Presidential Patterns and the Current Election

We are engaged in the most protracted presidential election in history. Many would claim that it is also among the most passionate and important. One thing's for sure: The 2007-2008 presidential election is among the most unusual that American voters have ever experienced:

Neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney is running for office. The last time that we had a presidential election in which no incumbent ran was 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon defeated Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman. 1952 was also the last year that a nomination went more than one round in a convention, in this case the Democratic convention.
Only two sitting senators have become president -- Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy. Currently, three sitting senators are vying for the presidency.
If John McCain becomes president, he will be the oldest man ever to enter that office: 72 and 1/2 years of age. Ronald Reagan was formerly the oldest: 69 years and 11 months. In fact, heretofore, only Reagan and Eisenhower were 70 years old while in office. Born August 29, 1936, McCain would become the first American president born in the 1930s (my decade, by the way).
If elected, John McCain will become our third president who was a prisoner of war (the first two were George Washington and Andrew Jackson) and our second Naval Academy graduate, after Jimmy Carter.
Hillary Clinton is the only First Lady to be elected to any office, in this case junior senator from New York. If Hillary is elected, she will be the first woman to be president.
If Barack Obama is elected, he will be the first president of non-Northern European ancestry, the first African American, and the fourth left hander among our last seven presidents. (Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were/are left handed -- and so is John McCain.)
Senator Obama would also be our fifth youngest president. Only Theodore Roosevelt (who entered office at the age of 42 years and 10 months in the wake of the assassination of President William McKinley), John F. Kennedy (43 years and seven months; our youngest elected president), Bill Clinton (46 years and five months), and Ulysses S. Grant (46 years and 10 months) entered office younger. If Barack Obama is elected, he would ascend to the presidency at the age of 47 years and five months.
Obama would be only our sixth president with brown eyes. John Quincy Adams, Andrew Johnson, and Chester Arthur in the 19th century and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the 20th century have been our only brown-eyed presidents. All the others had blue, hazel, green, or gray eyes, as have John McCain and Hillary Clinton. Given the remarkably high proportion (88%) of non-brown-eyed presidents, brown peepers, like relatively short stature, may work as a subliminal disadvantage.

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