{"id":417,"date":"2008-10-06T11:27:49","date_gmt":"2008-10-06T15:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/?p=417"},"modified":"2008-10-06T23:40:53","modified_gmt":"2008-10-07T03:40:53","slug":"short-people-for-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/2008\/10\/short-people-for-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"Short People for Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Times&#8217; &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2008\/10\/06\/opinion\/06opchart.html\">The Measure of a President<\/a>&#8221; provides visual proof that shorter candidates suffer a remarkable handicap in winning the Presidency. Part of the blame surely lies with the media, which regularly taints their coverage with heightist phrases like &#8220;Despite his diminutive stature&#8230;&#8221; And don&#8217;t get started with the term &#8220;scrappy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It is little wonder that short people are tempted to vote for John McCain, at 5&#8217;7&#8243; the shortest major party nominee since 1900. We are outraged by the heightism and discrimination spread by the mainstream media, and we are ready to fight back.<\/p>\n<p>Yet we cannot allow our own justifiable outrage cloud our vision. George W. Bush beat a taller opponent in both 2000 and 2004, and look where our country is now. The last candidate to accomplish this feat was Richard Nixon in 1968 &#8212; enough said. Presidents Bush and Nixon were an embarrassment to the short community, and John McCain&#8217;s sadly stereotypical Napoleonic tendencies will do us little good in combating societal prejudice.<\/p>\n<p>We look forward to a competent and qualified candidate of shorter stature who will earn our support. Change is coming: we already have one of the shortest Speakers of the House in recent history. Until that time, I am proud to be a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/home.php#\/group.php?gid=23864399453\">Short Person for Obama<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Times&#8217; &#8220;The Measure of a President&#8221; provides visual proof that shorter candidates suffer a remarkable handicap in winning the Presidency. Part of the blame surely lies with the media, which regularly taints their coverage with heightist phrases &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/2008\/10\/short-people-for-obama\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}