by Ben Shapiro
Carter did not go unscathed. When Reagan called the economic recession of 1980 a “depression,” Carter sneered, “That shows how little he knows.” Reagan accepted the point, then turned his rapier on Carter. “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job,” explained Reagan. “A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”110
Carter lost his job. Reagan took it. This time, the “beer buddy syndrome” steered America right—Reagan, one of the most effective presidents in American history, succeeded Carter, one of the worst.
GEORGE W. BUSH is a beneficiary of the “beer buddy syndrome.” Of course, he also had the good fortune to run against Al Gore in 2000—a man who is approximately as much fun as a bucket of rocks. Then he got even luckier—in 2004 he ran against John Kerry, a man who is more likely to sip a fine snifter of brandy than a beer.
Bush had a party-boy reputation during his college years. Appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Bush joked with Leno about his checkered past. “When you were out at a frat party, having a good time at Yale partying with the boys,” asked Leno, “were you ever thinking, ‘You know, I don’t want to have that beer. I might be running for president.’ Did that ever cross your mind?” Bush answered, “No.”111
As the cowboy candidate, W’s folksy manner and unassuming air made him a popular figure. Even though Bush gave up drinking at age forty, he still seemed like a fun guy to hang out with. Gore, by contrast, acted like a stiff. His deep but somewhat nasal monotone—and his repetition of key words like lockbox—made him tiresome. Everything about Gore seemed manipulated; everything about Bush seemed genuine. Gore proponent David Greising of the Chicago Tribune summed up Bush versus Gore:
In terms of, if you want somebody who is friendly running the country, and somebody—as some of these polls indicate—whom you would like to have a beer with us, I think you could say that George Bush is the guy you would like to have a beer with, and you think would be friendly—you would rather spend an hour with him in the Oval Office. Al Gore would annoy the hell out of you.112
In 2004, Bush faced another all-boring-all-the-time candidate, Senator John Kerry. As Kerry supporter Ciro Scotti of Business Week put it, Kerry was a man for “whom constructing the public persona of a regular Joe is a daily challenge.”113 Kerry’s frequent and expensive trips to the hairdresser, his elitist sporting choices, his history of marrying up in financial status—none of it played well with Americans. Neither did Kerry’s reputation for treating normal people like commoners.
Boston radio host and Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr wrote:
One of the surest ways to get the phones ringing on any Massachusetts talk-radio show is to ask people to call in and tell their John Kerry stories. The phone lines are soon filled, and most of the stories have a common theme: The junior senator pulling rank on one of his constituents, breaking in line, demanding to pay less (or nothing), or ducking out before the bill arrives. The tales often have one other common thread. Most end with Sen. Kerry inquiring of the lesser mortal: “Do you know who I am?”114
Once again, Bush triumphed.
Clearly, then, the “beer buddy syndrome” is still with us. The “beer buddy syndrome” doesn’t always work to perfection; many incompetents are quite likable.Warren G. Harding was apparently a genial fellow. So was Franklin Pierce.
But the “beer buddy syndrome” remains important. It is shorthand for likability—and personal likability is often an indicator of presidential performance. Easygoing people are likable, and easygoing people are not easily rattled in emergency circumstances—just look at Ronald Reagan. Funny people are likable, and funny people can cope with hard times—just look at Lincoln. Witty people are likable, and witty people are often intelligent—just look at Clinton and Coolidge. Confident people are likable, and confidence often determines presidential strength—just look at FDR and TR.
We want America strong and confident rather than weak and vacillating—and we want the presidents who represent our country to have those same qualities.When it comes to choosing presidents, personality counts.
6
The Hair Makes the Man
WHO IN THE WORLD was Warren G. Harding?
That was the question on America’s mind during the presidential campaign of 1920. Harding was a nobody; his political credentials were thin as carbon paper. He had owned a newspaper, had served in the Ohio state Senate, had been lieutenant governor, and had served in the United States Senate. During his time in the Senate, he had done nothing spectacular.
But he looked spectacularly good doing nothing.
Warren G. Harding had a face chiseled from granite. He may not have been a great man, but he looked like a great man. Joe Mitchell Chapple, one of Harding’s contemporaries, described Harding as a Greek god: “He was to me the embodiment of manly strength and vigor, bronzed . . . with his premature gray hair, a diadem of full-orbed maturity resting on his brow—one of the handsomest men I ever looked upon.”1
It was Harding’s looks that launched his political career. Political strategist Harry Daugherty first met Harding in 1899; he immediately decided that he would make Harding president. Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “Daugherty looked over at Harding and was instantly overwhelmed by what he saw.”2 Daugherty later explained that he pushed Harding’s 1920 run for the White House because “he looked like a President.”3 H. L. Mencken scoffed shortly before Harding’s nomination, “We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron . . . [Harding is] a third-rate political wheelhorse, with the face of a moving-picture actor, the intelligence of a respectable agricultural-implements dealer, and the imagination of a lodge-joiner.”4
Harding’s 1920 campaign focused almost entirely on his personality—and, because it was his most obvious personal feature, his good looks. Though there were many crucial issues to discuss during the election cycle—the viability of the League of Nations, the pursuit of peace in Europe, domestic disturbances in the aftermath of World War I—Harding discussed none of them. He ran a front porch campaign; six hundred thousand people visited his home in Ohio. His slogans, “Back to Normalcy” and “Let’s be done with wiggle and wobble,” provided a vague sense of stability to an uneasy nation.5
He spoke in platitudes. William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and an early contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, said, “His speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a struggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner in their midst until it died of servitude and overwork.”6
Mencken, characteristically, was even more brutal:
I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.7
Mencken did not overstate the case. In one speech, Harding invoked Christian imagery to say nothing in particular:
I tell you, my countrymen, the world needs more of the Christ; the world needs the spirit of the Man of Nazareth. If we could bring into the relationships of humanity among ourselves and among the nations of the world with the brotherhood that was taught by Christ, we would have a restored world; we would have little or none of war and we would have a new hope for humanity throughout the Earth. There never was a greater lesson taught than that of the Golden Rule.8
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It is difficult to defeat this kind of rhetoric—no one is against the Golden Rule. To oppose such aphoristic niceties would be to assume, by definition, the role of an anti-Christ.
By preaching tautologies, Harding avoided taking a hard position on the issues of his day. As biographers Eugene P. Trani and David L.Wilson wrote, “The candidate concentrated on projecting an image to the electorate—he would provide decent, economical government in a dignified manner—rather than discussing the issues.”9
Harding was “just plain folks,” according to the Morrow County Sentinel.10 Campaign manager Daugherty summed up the widespread public perception of Harding: “He was just a plain, honest American who meant what he said when he urged his policy of getting the country back to normalcy.”11
But Harding was more than that. He brought a solemn-looking grandeur to his candidacy. Looking at Warren G. Harding’s portrait through today’s eyes, Harding bears a certain resemblance to an older Lionel Barrymore. If you saw Harding walking down the street, you would immediately think Wall Street executive, judge, or politician. Harry Daugherty thought “president.” Harding rode his looks all the way to the White House, winning by the largest percentage margin to that time—where the “embodiment of manly strength” died, two years into his first term.
IF WARREN G. HARDING HAD BEEN BALD, he never would have been president. That silver thatch of hair set Harding apart and completed the picture of distinguished but powerful older gentleman. It set off his dark eyes and heavy eyebrows; it contrasted with his movie star tan. Harding’s hair didn’t make him president—but it didn’t hurt either.
Hair is important to us. Out of our forty-three presidents, only five have been bald; one of those, Eisenhower, ran twice against the similarly bald Adlai Stevenson; another, Gerald Ford, succeeded to the presidency. This is an extraordinary statistic. The average age of winning presidential candidates is close to sixty, and more than half of American men begin balding by age fifty12R12 yet 88 percent of our presidents have had enough hair to comb over without looking silly. Clearly Americans do not like candidates who resemble Dr. Phil.
We judge people based on their looks; President Harding was the beneficiary of that tendency. Malcolm Gladwell called Harding’s appeal “The Warren G. Harding Error.” Gladwell wrote:
Many people who looked at Warren G. Harding saw how extraordinarily handsome and distinguished-looking he was and jumped to the immediate—and entirely unwarranted—conclusion that he was a man of courage and intelligence and integrity. They didn’t dig below the surface. The way he looked carried so many powerful connotations that it stopped the normal process of thinking dead in its tracks. The Warren G. Harding error is the downside of rapid cognition. It is at the root of a great deal of prejudice and discrimination. It’s why picking the right candidate for a job is so difficult and why, on more occasions than we may care to admit, utter mediocrities sometimes end up in positions of enormous responsibility.13
Gladwell is correct; there are heavy downsides to rapid cognition. But there are also upsides. Hair can tell us a good deal about a candidate: it reflects age; it reflects money; it reflects general societal attitude. Hair, as other aspects of personal appearance, is subject to the dictates of fashion.
Hair is the reason that George McGovern didn’t stand a chance in the 1972 election—though the issue wasn’t McGovern’s hair but his supporters’ hair. Hair may be the reason that JFK won the 1960 election—and perhaps the reason men’s hats went out of fashion. Reagan’s Brylcreemed ’do satisfied voters that he was vigorous enough for the job. Lincoln’s facial hair became an iconic inspiration for the next half-century of presidential candidates; Horace Greeley’s bizarre neck beard and baldness made him easy fodder for caricaturists. John Kerry’s expensive haircuts and well-coiffed running mate provoked guffaws; Ulysses S. Grant’s close-cut beard accentuated his image of solidity. Andrew Jackson’s wild mane reinforced his image as a wilderness man; John Quincy Adams’s bald pate contributed to his reputation as an effete old man.
Brilliant political commentator and godfather of soul James Brown summed up the art of appearance. “Hair is the first thing,” he wrote. “And teeth are the second. Hair and teeth. A man got those two things he’s got it all.”14 Since John Adams, teeth have not been a campaign issue. Hair, on the other hand, remains a telling indicator of just who a candidate is.
GEORGE WASHINGTON DID NOT wear a wig. By the time he assumed the presidency, wigs had gone out of style. Instead, he frequently invoked his gray hair as evidence that he had served his country long and well. He needn’t have done so; his reputation as the father of his country was already well secured.
For John Adams, however, hair was more of a problem. Adams, unlike Washington, was a controversial figure. He had a fiery temperament and an unbridled willingness to do what he thought was right, for good or ill. And Adams, unlike Washington, had a real political challenger in Thomas Jefferson.
Adams had beaten Jefferson in the 1796 election. By 1800, however, the incumbent was in poor shape. At sixty-five years old, Adams was short, bald, and ill-tempered; Jefferson, fifty-seven, was tall, well-coiffed, and aristocratic in temperament. Adams gave up wearing wigs as they went out of fashion, but wasn’t above using wigs as physical weapons: after the 1796 election, Adams had foolishly retained President Washington’s cabinet; the cabinet members irked him so much that he would periodically fling his wig at them during cabinet meetings.15 Jefferson observed that Adams would specifically call meetings in order to indulge his temper, shouting obscenities at the cabinet members while “dashing and trampling his wig on the floor.” “This only proves,” Jefferson snidely concluded, “what you and I knew, that he had a better heart than head.”16
Adams’s wig-tossing exhibitions earned him the scorn of Jefferson’s paid journalistic lackey, James Callendar. Callendar, who described Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman,” used the alleged wig flinging to question Adams’s “malignant passions.” What “species of madness” had seduced Americans into voting for such a man?
“The historian will search for those occult causes that induced her to exalt an individual who has neither that innocence of sensibility which incites it to love, nor that omnipotence of intellect which commands to admire,” Callendar poisonously penned. “He will ask why the United States degrades themselves to the choice of a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature, of a wretch that has neither the science of a magistrate, the politeness of a courtier, nor the courage of a man?”17 Another journalistic rogue, Benjamin Franklin Bache, was more to the point: Adams, he wrote, was “old, bald, blind, querulous, toothless, crippled.”18
Jefferson, by contrast, was the very picture of masculinity and health. In his youth, he had a tremendous head of red hair, a head of hair that drew the attention of his contemporaries. His hair whitened as he grew older, lending him a distinguished and handsome appearance; it was said that he grew more handsome as he grew older.19 While Federalists tended to powder their hair or don wigs, Republicans wore their hair naturally,20 lending a more democratic and less stilted look to the Democratic-Republican candidate.
A race between a short, bald, wig-heaving fire-breather and a tall, thick-haired, dignified, plantation Democrat is no race at all. Adams was no match for Jefferson in 1800.
ADAMS’S SON FACED THE SAME challenge in 1828. John Quincy Adams inherited his father’s looks—and his shiny head. By the time of the 1828 election, Adams had lost all the hair on his head, though he compensated with a set of muttonchops that would put Elvis Presley to shame. The effect was rather off-putting, however; Adams looked upper crust and namby-pamby. Biographer John Torrey Morse described Adams’s appearance:
He was short, rotund, and bald; about the time when he entered Congress [after his presidency], complaints become frequent in his diary of weak and inflamed eyes, and soon these organ
s became so rheumy that the water would trickle down his cheeks; a shaking of the hand grew upon him to such an extent that in time he had to use artificial assistance to steady it for writing; his voice was high, shrill, liable to break, piercing enough to make itself heard, but not agreeable . . . He was irritable and quick to wrath; he himself constantly speaks of the infirmity of his temper, and in his many conflicts his principle concern was to keep it in control.21
Like father, like son.
Quincy Adams looked particularly bad when contrasted with his alpha male opponent, Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s hair was thick, wavy, and wild. It stood straight up and back, granting him an electrified look—one of his contemporaries, Ann Rutherford, posited that Jackson slicked back his hair with bear’s oil.22 Though Jackson’s hair whitened as he aged, he lost none of it; in a portrait painted two years before his death in 1837, Jackson retained a “shock of stiff white hair.”23 Jackson biographer John William Ward wrote, “One of the most distinctive of Jackson’s physical characteristics was his bristling gray hair, which even until old age rose straight back from his high forehead.”24
Jackson’s hair wasn’t the only hair at issue in 1828. Jackson had made his reputation by fighting Native Americans—and that raised images of scalping. During the Indian Wars, Jackson acquired the name “Sharp Knife” from Native American chieftans. He earned the nickname, once threatening that atrocity would be met with atrocity—“An Eye for an Eye, Toothe for Toothe and Scalp for Scalp.”25 When then Senator Jackson ran for president in 1824, fellow politicians supposed that Jackson would arrive at the Senate bearing “a scalping knife in one hand and a tomahawk in the other, allways [sic] ready to knock down, and scalp any and every person who differed with me in opinion.” Jackson, instead, demonstrated remarkable fortitude and reasonableness.26 Nonetheless, in 1828, Quincy Adams’s supporters attempted to tar Jackson with his brutality during the Indian Wars; they distributed “coffin handbills” accusing Jackson of wholesale slaughter of Native American women and children.27
