clinton

It’s time to gear up for the 2016 United States Presidential election race! Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Hillary Clinton, and Marco Rubio — in that order — have all announced or will announce that they will be running for president.

Now marks the beginning of the inevitable wait until Rand Paul becomes the next president. But in the meantime, I wonder about whether the United States has ever had a prominent deaf politician. Anyone in the Senate? How about the House of Representatives? Or even a member in a state legislature, or a mayor for a large city? Due to their average age, I’m sure we have had some slightly hearing-impaired politicians, but those don’t count to me. I’m talking about someone who was born deaf or became deaf at a young age, and who knows sign language, and who has strong connections to the Deaf community? Here, I’m using the capital “D” to indicate association with the community.

Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, America has never had one. On Wikipedia, there’s currently two relevant pages: “Deaf politicians” and “List of Deaf People“. (I know there are politicians who don’t have Wikipedia pages, but the simple existence of such a page indicates that there is some prestige to the position to which the politician is elected.)

The “Deaf politicians” page currently lists 14 relevant names. What’s interesting to me is that none of these people are or were American politicians. There are four British, two Hungarian, one French, one Austrian, one Greek, one Belgian, one Icelander, one Canadian, one South African, and one New Zelander.

It’s also intriguing that the list of deaf politicians is dominated by Europeans. It seems like a future topic of investigation would be to see if there exist additional biases against deaf people in non-European countries as compared to European countries. I’m particularly curious about the treatment of deaf people in Asian countries.

That second page, “List of Deaf People” does not provide any new deaf politicians outside of what the first page did.

Thus, it looks like America has lacked prominent deaf politicians in its entire existence. From my investigation, the closest thing we have had as a deaf politician is that Canadian guy, Gary Malkowski, because he spoke in American Sign Language while on the job. (Here is a biography of him, and another one on lifeprint.com, which is also an excellent resource for getting up-to-speed on ASL.) Mr. Malkowski was probably the first truly elected deaf politician in the world, serving on the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1990 to 1995 and becoming one of the world’s foremost advocates of rights for people with disabilities. Not being Canadian, I don’t have a good idea of how prestigious his position was, but I imagine it’s comparable to being a member of an American state legislature? His background includes a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work and Psychology from Gallaudet University.

While it is disappointing that the Deaf American Politician has never come into play, I am sure that within the next thirty years, we will be seeing at least one such person, given how numerous barriers have eroded over the years to allow a more educated deaf population, though I’m guessing there will be some debate over the “level of deafness” of such a candidate who shows up. I would bet that if this future politician has a background in American Sign Language and has even a weak connection to the Deaf Community, he or she will be able to win the vote of most of the severely hearing-impaired population (which includes the Deaf Community). The main question, of course, would be if the general population can provide the necessary votes.

To be clear, a deaf person should not automatically vote for a deaf politician, akin to how a black person should not automatically vote for Barack Obama or a woman should not automatically vote for Hillary Clinton. But such demographic information is a factor, and people can relate to those who share similar experiences. For instance, being deaf is key for positions such as the presidency of Gallaudet University.

To wrap up this post, here’s my real prediction for the two ultimate candidates for the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: Hillary Clinton and Scott Walker. Jeb Bush is not winning his party’s nomination since voters will (possibly unfairly) associate him with his brother.

I’ll come back to this post in a little over a year to see if I predicted correctly. By then, hopefully there will be a deaf person who is making a serious run for a political position, but I doubt it.