How are these men similiar?

It would probably help to know who they are.

Well, most people will be able to ID Nelson Mandela.

You know, the 90 year old Nobel Peace Prize winner only recently removed from the US Government's terrorist watch list...one down, 999,999 "security risks' to go! That Ed Kennedy guy still probably has an axe to grind about that thing in Dallas, but I digress.

The other guy....no one? Bueller? Bueller?

Well, here's how I got started on this.

I was listening to the BBC's reporting on Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday and they mentioned that he was "South Africa's first democratically elected president". This got me to thinking.

If universal suffrage = democracy (and conversely less than universal suffrage <> democracy) then I wondered who was the US's first democratically elected president?

Washington? Yeah right...No it took another 133 years after him to actually elect a president democratically in the USA.

Any guesses? Well, I did pretty much give it away by showing his picture above.

Warren G. Harding btw.