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Christie White House bid talk spurs obesity debate
By Bill Berkrot | Reuters
9 photos - Fri, Sep 30, 2011
(Reuters) Speculation that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will enter the presidential race has led to a feverish debate about the possibility of having the fattest man in the White House since the corpulent William Howard Taft squeezed behind the big desk in the Oval Office.
Of course Taft, who reportedly weighed nearly 340 pounds during his presidency, ran for the highest office in 1908 when there wasn't the same focus on image and no need to worry about how a candidate looked on television.
Christie, who had ruled it out for months has been reconsidering whether to join the race for the Republican nomination in the past week, according to news reports.
He talks about his battle to lose weight and sometimes jokes about his size - he once exaggerated that he was 550 pounds. But he has not disclosed his actual weight.
That hasn't stopped an onslaught from television comedians and newspaper columnists in the past week.
Late-night talk-show host David Letterman's list of ten "ways the country would be different if Chris Christie was President" last Tuesday were all based on weight and food, including that the Cabinet would have a Secretary of Cake and the U.S. would invade pancake chain IHOP rather than Iraq.
But the jokes are no laughing matter to many.
The idea that poking such fun at Christie's weight is somehow acceptable in a way that it would not be if the jokes involved a disability or someone's ethnicity, adds to concerns about discrimination faced by the overweight.
http://news.yahoo.com/obesity-debate...005232473.html
By Bill Berkrot | Reuters
9 photos - Fri, Sep 30, 2011
(Reuters) Speculation that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will enter the presidential race has led to a feverish debate about the possibility of having the fattest man in the White House since the corpulent William Howard Taft squeezed behind the big desk in the Oval Office.
Of course Taft, who reportedly weighed nearly 340 pounds during his presidency, ran for the highest office in 1908 when there wasn't the same focus on image and no need to worry about how a candidate looked on television.
Christie, who had ruled it out for months has been reconsidering whether to join the race for the Republican nomination in the past week, according to news reports.
He talks about his battle to lose weight and sometimes jokes about his size - he once exaggerated that he was 550 pounds. But he has not disclosed his actual weight.
That hasn't stopped an onslaught from television comedians and newspaper columnists in the past week.
Late-night talk-show host David Letterman's list of ten "ways the country would be different if Chris Christie was President" last Tuesday were all based on weight and food, including that the Cabinet would have a Secretary of Cake and the U.S. would invade pancake chain IHOP rather than Iraq.
But the jokes are no laughing matter to many.
The idea that poking such fun at Christie's weight is somehow acceptable in a way that it would not be if the jokes involved a disability or someone's ethnicity, adds to concerns about discrimination faced by the overweight.
http://news.yahoo.com/obesity-debate...005232473.html
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