The most popular politicians are often the ones who seem like they’re “one of us”—ordinary people. But just like us ordinary people, they sometimes make some very weird decisions.
GETTING A LEG UP
Hajnal Ban, a city councilor in Logan City, Australia, always felt that at 5′0″ she wasn’t taken seriously, either as a lawyer or as a politician. So in 2001, she went to an orthopedic clinic in Russia and paid $40,000 to have her legs broken in four places. Then, over the course of nine months, surgeons stretched Ban’s legs by a millimeter or so every day. After nearly a year of excruciating pain in a foreign hospital, Ban returned to her city council position…three inches taller.
In Australia, it’s illegal for people under the age of 18 to smoke. But officials at the Department of Education of the Capital Territory (the district that includes the capital city of Canberra) have allowed a 16-year-old student at Stromlo High School not only to legally smoke, but to take cigarette breaks during her classes. The ruling was based on a doctor’s recommendation that the student is “so clinically addicted to nicotine” that she can’t function without constantly consuming it—and that not smoking would make her schoolwork suffer.
In 2006 Bonilyn Wilbanks-Free was the town manager (similar to a mayor) of Golden Beach, Florida, when she referred to one of her assistants as “Mammy.” The assistant, whose name is actually Barbara Tarasenko, is African American, and Wilbanks-Free, who is white, was evidently referring to an old racial stereotype of smiling, motherly, African-American maid characters. Tarasenko, visibly offended, wasn’t any happier when Wilbanks-Free tried to soften her first comment by saying, “You know how much I love Aunt Jemima.” A month later, Wilbanks-Free resigned her position.
It is still technically against the law for a woman to wear pants in Paris.
In 2008 a heated presidential campaign and a press hungry for human-interest stories was the perfect recipe for…well, “Recipegate.” Presidential candidate John McCain and his wife Cindy—heiress to a multimillion-dollar beer distribution company—were often criticized by their opponents as being out of touch with ordinary Americans. To counter that image, the McCain campaign began posting “Cindy’s McCain Family Recipes” on its Web site. One problem: The folksy recipes were lifted word for word from the Food Network Website—a fact that a New York attorney discovered when she went searching online for a tuna recipe. After news outlets got hold of the story, the McCain campaign quickly deleted the recipes and blamed the “error” on a low-level staffer, who was later “disciplined.”
In 2008 the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent, England, issued a ban on the term “brainstorming” because the term—which means coming up with ideas at a meeting—might be considered offensive to epileptics, whose seizures have been described by doctors as a “storm of the brain.” Instead, the council recommended the terms “thought sharing” and “blue-sky thinking.”
In 1995 the Russian presidential delegation made an official state visit to Washington, D.C. The Clinton administration put the party up in Blair House, where visiting dignitaries often stay. But in the middle of the night, Secret Service agents found a man standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear, extremely drunk and trying to hail a cab so he could go get a pizza. The agents returned the man to Blair House after they determined his identity: Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
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“The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.”
—Mark Twain
Connecticut state representatives were caught playing solitare on their laptops during a 2009 budget mtg.