Hair’s to the chief?
November 2nd, 2007 – 1:26 PM by Bob von SternbergAmericans may (or may not) be ready to elect a woman as their president. Same goes for electing an African-American. But if a half-century of history is any indication, they’re not about to elect a bald president (sorry, Rudy; sorry, Fred).
A sure indication we’ve entered one of the sloughs of the presidential campaign (races solidifying, story lines getting tiresome, still weeks away from meaningful votes) is the fact that people (well, a few) have begun musing on the whether a requirement of the presidency is a hirsute head.
Time magazine kicked it off about a week ago, pointing out that the United States last
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elected a bald president in 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower knocked off the equally chrome-domed Adlai Stevenson.
That made him only the fifth hairless president, by the magazine’s recknoning, and the first since Martin Van Buren,
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elected in 1836.
Predictably, babbling over presidential baldness popped up all over the Internet, most of it focusing on Rudy Giuliani’s decision to stride out of the closet and show himself to be bald and proud five years ago when he abandoned his unfortunate (and widely ridiculed) comb-over. That momentous moment in American political history was memorably chronicled in the Washington Post. (Before, with predecessor John Lindsay, after, in Minneapolis recently.)
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Perhaps not surprisingly, advocates for the hair-challenged — including doctors who specialize on hair transplants — were all too happy to jump into the fray.
Minnesota politics bonus: Often mentioned in the discussion of the hairstyles of presidentical candidates was former Minnesota Gov. Harold Stassan, he of the quadrennial quixotic presidential campaigns and the startling toupee once compared to ” sullen possum that had been dipped in bronze.”
One response to "Hair’s to the chief?"
I don’t think the presence of these stories indicate what you think it does. The media has been obsessed with nonsense since the very beginning of this campaign (and for several others). Witness the study that came out last week that said that less that 1% of the stories on 2008 evaluated the candidate’s records and past histories, and over 60% were about “process”, like fundraising and strategy. Only 15% of stories talked about the actual platforms candidates were running on, and only 12% of stories talked about the impact of candidate’s platforms on the lives of real people.
The media has taken to trying to entertain itself during the interminably long campaign instead of informing us. (Of course, it’s the media that in large part is to blame for the long campaign season by stoking the fires of the next campaign immediately after the end of one election cycle.)