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I probably need a nap. I don't know why this seems so confusing to me...
FDR definitely avoided being seen in a wheelchair for the clear reason that he did not wish to be perceived as disabled. Conventional wisdom is often misguided, but I believe that conventional wisdom casts the FDR story squarely in the past --i.e., people may not have been accepting of a disabled person as president fifty years ago; but knowing that FDR performed his presidential duties as ably as any other person, we no longer have this prejudice... which could be poppycock. His statue in the FDR Memorial depicts him in a wheelchair --but the wheels are mostly obscured by folds of robe and very tiny, more like casters.
Also, the way that I'm remembering the Dole campaign is that his disability wasn't hidden. I don't mean that they constantly showed his withered arm on the news, just that he talked about it freely enough. I didn't know the thing about John McCain losing his grip, though --or I thought I did, but I wasn't thinking literally at the time. Then again, they didn't get elected.
So I'm trying to figure out this: today knowing the example of FDR, would voters still reject a candidate who was disabled? And taking it as a given that the media would not be as accommodating as they were back then. Have attitudes toward the disabled not really changed in the intervening years, despite a fairly full-court press by the ADA? Are we just conscious about we're supposed to say in public about the disabled just being "differently abled," but we stick to our subconscious guns in the voting booth? |
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