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Is America Ready for a Bald President?
By James Rosen
WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton aspires to become the United States’ first female president, Barack Obama the first African-American to win the office, and one has only to throw a cyber-stick to find the latest ruminations on whether we Americans are truly “ready” for such a revolutionary moment.
Yet for all the attention paid to the ostensibly irrelevant criteria of sex and race, few have focused on the related question of another potential “first” that threatens to raise its (ugly? you decide) head during this presidential cycle: namely, whether we are ready for our first bald president — or at least the first in the age of what historians call “the television presidency.”
The sudden prominence in national and local polling of G.O.P. contenders Rudy Giuliani and the as-yet-unannounced Fred Thompson suggest we may soon, for the first time in almost half a century, hail a follically challenged chief executive.
In Giuliani’s case, what was, for about a decade, an unpardonable comb-over was suddenly transformed, shortly after the death of the former mayor’s mother, into a more accepting and natural-looking sweep-back. Seldom do professional politicians behave in more overtly Freudian fashion, especially when it comes to matters of fashion.
Story continues here...
WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton aspires to become the United States’ first female president, Barack Obama the first African-American to win the office, and one has only to throw a cyber-stick to find the latest ruminations on whether we Americans are truly “ready” for such a revolutionary moment.
Yet for all the attention paid to the ostensibly irrelevant criteria of sex and race, few have focused on the related question of another potential “first” that threatens to raise its (ugly? you decide) head during this presidential cycle: namely, whether we are ready for our first bald president — or at least the first in the age of what historians call “the television presidency.”
The sudden prominence in national and local polling of G.O.P. contenders Rudy Giuliani and the as-yet-unannounced Fred Thompson suggest we may soon, for the first time in almost half a century, hail a follically challenged chief executive.
In Giuliani’s case, what was, for about a decade, an unpardonable comb-over was suddenly transformed, shortly after the death of the former mayor’s mother, into a more accepting and natural-looking sweep-back. Seldom do professional politicians behave in more overtly Freudian fashion, especially when it comes to matters of fashion.
Story continues here...
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