{"id":11745,"date":"2008-12-26T10:32:15","date_gmt":"2008-12-26T18:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2008\/12\/26\/11745.html"},"modified":"2008-12-26T10:32:15","modified_gmt":"2008-12-26T18:32:15","slug":"americans-admire-presidents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2008\/12\/26\/americans-admire-presidents\/","title":{"rendered":"Americans admire Presidents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

According to this year's annual USA Today<\/cite>\/Gallup poll, the living man who Americans admire most<\/a> is Barack Obama, who was named by 32% of respondents.<\/p>\n

That doesn't surprise me too much. What does surprise me is that George W. Bush came in second, named by 5% of respondents.<\/p>\n

It turns out that GWB has come in first in the annual survey for the past seven years. A Gallup article about last year's survey<\/a> explains that \"the sitting president has been the most admired man every year since 1981, and in 50 of the 61 times the question has been asked overall.\"<\/p>\n

I was a little surprised by that, too, until I noticed that the pollsters don't prompt respondents with suggestions, and that the percentages for this year's top six men (three-way tie for fourth place) add up to only 46%. (Percentages for this year's top five women also add up to under 50%.) So I suspect that an awful lot of respondents say things like \"My father\" or \"Mr. Gryzbowski who owns the corner grocery store\"; but if less than about 20 people in the 1000-person survey name a given person, that person won't make the top-5 list.<\/p>\n

Still, I'm a little surprised to see politicians and religious figures feature so prominently. I would have expected the top spots to include some musicians or actors, maybe news (or fake-news) anchors, maybe athletes (especially in an Olympic year), and so on. But I guess in those areas the field is again too wide--even if half the respondents named an actor, they would probably all pick different actors.<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton tops the most-admired-woman list, as she's done in 13 of the past 16 years; this year, Sarah Palin came in second. Interesting to see that three of the top five women this year are black: Oprah, Condoleeza Rice, and Michelle Obama. Oprah and Rice were both in the top three last year. Oh, interesting: last year Angelina Jolie came in fourth. And Benazir Bhutto and Maya Angelou were both in last year's top ten.<\/p>\n

Anyway, on this particular pair of questions I'm more interested in personal and individual choices than in the polling aggregate. So: what man living today do you admire most? What woman living today do you admire most? And, for both, why? (Skip any questions you don't want to answer.)<\/p>\n

I realize I've unfairly seeded the ground with suggestions in the above, so this isn't unprompted. Then again, it's an Internet survey, so it's not scientifically valid anyway.<\/p>\n

Three clarifying notes: (1) it's fine for you to put one of the people who made the top of the poll; (2) I welcome responses from anyone in the world, not just Americans; (3) you can name people from anywhere in the world. (But they do have to be alive.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to this year’s annual USA Today\/Gallup poll, the living man who Americans admire most is Barack Obama, who was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}