Ask not...

I'm currently sitting at Panera, looking for pictures of famous speechmakers. I'm planning on putting them on one of my bulletin boards this year. As I started thinking about this plan of mine, I was brainstorming with my mom. We were trying to think of famous speeches. We thought of FDR and JFK and MLK. As we discussed this, I said, "Ya know, it would be really nice if we could come up with at least one good speech maker who didn't cheat on his wife." We laughed about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I started analyzing it. I mean, look at Bill Clinton--totally sleazy, but extremely persuasive. When he gave his famous National Prayer Breakfast speech, even I wanted to believe he was truly sorry. I wonder if there is a connection. Are good speakers more likely to also be unfaithful? Or is it just a random coincidence. Or is it that by the time you get to a place to make a famous speech you have lost enough of yourself that you can justify cheating? Who knows? We did think of one guy that we thought might have been a bit more...whatever--Lincoln. The other sad fact was that after 2 days of thinking and talking about this, I couldn't think of a single famous speech made by a female. I think that says something about "equality." There must have been women who could have made incredible speeches, but they were never visible enough to become an integral part of history. Maybe those kinds of speeches were made, it's just that no one documented them or put them in a history book.