I have a lot of reasons to keep the weight off, but thankfully “So I can become president” is not one of them. According to Slate, however, Mike Huckabee should add it to his list. The former governor of Arkansas lost 110 pounds several years ago after living out a fat person’s nightmare: he broke a chair in front of 50 cabinet members. (Thankfully I never broke any furniture when I was fat, but I did break a bed once. It wasn’t entirely my fault though since other people were involved. Once you drag your mind out of the gutter you will be disappointed to learn it was not at an orgy, but at a sleepover in middle school and there was no lesbian experimentation involved.) Huckabee wrote a book called Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork: A 12-Stop Program to End Bad Habits and Begin a Healthy Lifestyle which helped launch him into the national spotlight. That’s why Slate thinks his weight is important as he campaigns for the [...]

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It’s fairly common knowledge that you have to be skinny to be a model or an actress, but do you have to fight the battle of the bulge to become president? And I’m not talking about having a World War II service record. A recent Newsweek article says that Al Gore’s waistline might be an indicator of whether he decides to run for president and that “the theory is that slimming down will be a signal he intends to run.”

Would we elect a fat president? A president’s health and fitness is always a campaign issue, so one could argue that an obese candidate would be more likely to die in office. But I think the aesthetic issue is more important. I seriously doubt we’d elect a candidate in a wheelchair today, but Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to wheel himself into office because the TV and Internet didn’t exist. If we were to elect a fat president, they’d have to be damn charming or charismatic to compensate for the perceived negative of being overweight. Bill [...]

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