Across the pond

Thinking about the sudden attack in the London Times, charaterising Obama implicitly as too left wing to get elected, I was reminded of the several times I have seen Obama on television, writing rather awkwardly with his left hand. But in the thousands of words that I have read about Obama in the mainstream media, I cannot remember reading anything there about Obama’s left handedness. So I decided to Google on Obama and left-handed. It produced a huge number of references. The majority were from blogs. And at least two of them very interesting.

The highest reference from the mainstream was an article from the New York Times from as far back as last June. When I checked the article I found that it was not really about left-handedness, it was about Obama’s willingness to play basketball, which many American men (this addressed to my Brit readers) follow with the kind of enthusiasm that most Brit males reserve for soccer, rugby or cricket.

The article, ’Where Obama  goes elbow to elbow’, looked at the meaning of the sports which American Presidents have favoured, comparing it to JFK’s sailing, Clinton’s golf and Kerry’s windsurfing. Had I written on this subject I would also have mentioned the hours Eisenhower spent on the golf course with his businessmen cronies. And I would have noted the progression in British politics of the left. The shift from Harold Wilson, who was content to sit in the stand at Huddesfield to Tony Blair, who took off his jacket and kicked a ball about to show that he was a man of the people.

The left-handed references in the NYT article were in passing. And it took me a while to find them, because the NYT does not do short articles, even about basketball. Obama throws with his left as well as writes with his left. And he is quite good at it. Even more interesting, given the current debate about whether Obama will be able to stand the flak when the battle for Presidency gets really nasty, is what the NYT had to say about his basketball. As the headline implies he has learnt to use his elbows, unsurprisingly since he had to compete with giants. (Most successful basketball players look at least seven feet tall to me.)

The two blogs I looked at  -

http://www.helium.com/tm/763455/noticed-opponent-barack-obama

and

2008/02/01/barack-obama-is-left-handed/

did have something interesting to say about left-handedness. Let me give you a quote from one of them, who responded to a query about whether America had ever had a left handed President.

The most interesting takeaway: Obama is left-handed. Four of our last six presidents have been southpaws: Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. (The country has turned increasingly left-handed. Before Ford, only James Garfield and Harry Truman were lefties, though Truman could throw a baseball with either arm.) This would seem to bode well for Obama.

Most journalists are only too happy to write about candidate’s sporting preferences, but the way they are trained in Britain and America, encourages them to steer away from drawing any conclusions about traits such as left-handedness. That sounds too much like psychologising. And in a proper journalist wants to venture into those areas, he should be quoting a proper psychologist, not relying on his own judgment.

I have got over such inhibitions. So here are my views on left-handedness, gleaned from reading several good psychologists with as much zeal as I employ, reading the reports of the journalists on the spot in this American presidential campaign.

Internationally the average percentage of left-handedness in the population is about 15 per cent. In China that is the actual percentage of the population, or was when the studies which I read were made. But in Britain and America, only 11 per cent of the population write with their left hand. The psychologists think that this is because most left-handers were encouraged to switch to writing with their right hand. Because our society is geared to the right-handed majority, including many of the things we have to handle every day. And it is much more difficult to write fluently with the left hand. Because our writing is geared to the flow from left to right.

Obama, unlike the four per cent of left handers who decided to learn the majority way, stuck to his own perceptions. He remained his own man, even though he differed from the majority.

And I can see as I write now, that this fits in with what I have grown to like about Obama as I have followed this campaign. He makes up his own mind. He is not the prisoner of his upbringing or his racial origins. He was born a mixture of black and white, a coloured, which do not even have a constituency in the US. After all, many of the US coloured population came about because the slave owners, and later generations of posh east coast types, took their pleasure with their child minders.

This line of thinking leads me to reflect on Bill Clinton, who is above all an extravert who is blissfully happy doing the glad handed campaigning bit. (This is not a disguised criticism. He likes being liked. But that does not mean that his judgments are not mostly made from his above average intelligince and his acquired understanding of the way the world works.

Bill Clinton, like Lyndon B Johnson before him, was brougth up amongst the prejudices of the American south, where he was one of the white rulers. But as President he listened to what they said, and what all those coloured people from the world outside had to say about American policies.

I do not have any knowledge at all about what is happening in the Clinton household. But my guess is that they are not arguing about the latest undergraduate who Bill has chatted up at parities. They might well beconsidering whether it is not about time for Hillary to start thinking about whether she can can make her peace with Obama and take an important role in his administration.

Because on the lines of this analysis (so-called) Hillary knows about left handers.

They have a more difficult time than the majority in establishing their identities. >Perhaps that is why she was able to forgive Bill for his philandering.  Perhaps that would enable her to forgive Obama for beating her.

A big if.

But it is worth thinking about.