Presidential firsts

I've long thought that I'd never live to see the first Asian American president. But then again I never thought I'd see an African American either. We've had some notable first already like Buchanan was the first unmarried president, Kennedy was the first Catholic and George Washington was our first white president. I'm pretty sure we're going to see another broken barrier at some point in the near future. What do you think it'll be? Let me know in the little poll on the right.

Presidential Social Networks

So I did a little legwork and came up with this graph to illustrate something. It started as pure curiosity of how many Facebook likes and Twitter followers each of the candidates had. Clearly Obama blows everyone out of the water. Left wing spin is "It's because he's that good!" Right wing spin is "He's cheating a la Acorn!" But after compiling this info I started thinking about another trend.

I realize social network popularity is NOT an accurate depiction of the country at large. It merely shows who likes/follows a specific candidate among those who use the internet, who bother using social networks, who bother liking/following candidates. So instead of focusing on who had the highest numbers, I started thinking about what this data reveals about social network users. Looking at the numbers it seems social network users fall heavily into the left side of the spectrum. Even all the GOP candidates added up don't equal 10% of just Obama's numbers.

If this is true, then left-leaning people may also be more open to having their personal information available to the public. I definitely know some folks firmly on the right who stay away from social networking like the plague for specifically this reason. This mirrors the stereotype of lefties being more trusting of government to be capable of solving larger issues and righties distrust of leaving things to other people.

But I guess all this makes sense since Al Gore birthed the internet...gross. I have to go wash my eyes of that image now.