Watching the debate between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole the other night, the sophisticated political analyst couldn’t help but ponder an urgent question:
In this day and age, could a bald man be elected president?
One look at the candidates’ hair and the sophisticated political analyst could only conclude: No way.
For both the president and the man who’d like to be, hair is a vital campaign prop. Dole, at 73, uses his preternaturally brown hair to prove his eternal youth. Clinton, at 50, uses his prematurely white hair to prove his ancient wisdom.
Dole’s hair is sensible, grown-up, Midwestern hair that brings to mind a patent leather beanie. Clinton’s is more like a frisky poodle, though during the debate it was so locked up by lacquer I’d swear I heard it yelping, “Let me out!”
Different candidates, different hair, but both men groom their heads as if their scalps were prize racehorses. They’d be sunk if they were hairless. And in these TV times, so would any other presidential candidate.
Take this quiz: Who was the last bald man elected president?
If you answered Gerald Ford, you flunk. Ford stepped unelected into the office Richard Nixon vacated in a hurry, and when he tried to get elected, the electorate tossed him out. No wonder. His thinning top was up against Jimmy Carter’s fertile field of follicles.
To test my theory of presidents and baldness, I sought out a poster of presidential postage stamps.
Studying the heads of presidents through the ages, a person might deduce that baldness had been cured in 1961. That was the year John Kennedy and his telegenic locks replaced Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose head was as naked as a newborn. No president’s pate since then has looked like Ike’s.
How to explain this trend? And can it be reversed?
Like any good political reporter, I turned for answers to the experts.
“Well, that’s an interesting question, isn’t it?” said John T. Capps III, founder of Bald-Headed Men of America, a self-esteem support group for bald men. I reached him at his office at 102 Bald Drive in Morehead City, N.C.
“I certainly think a bald man could be elected president,” Capps said, “because hair is really the third thing that people notice about a person.”
My mind was racing through racy possibilities for numbers one and two when he added: “The first two being their eyes and facial expression.”
Then he bellowed, “HOWEVER!”
He went on. “You and I both know hair is a billion-dollar industry and it’s a priceless personal feeling of vanity how our hair flows in the wind, glistens in the sun, sparkles in the moonlight. You couple that with the employment situation of how many hairstylists there are, how many companies make shampoo, how many companies make hair rinse, how many companies make combs, hair brushes, hair dryers, hair blowers, hair curlers. It’s obvious nobody wants anybody to be bald-headed.”
I took that diatribe to mean he wasn’t at all sure Americans would elect a bald president.
There was a time when bald was beautiful among the men who ran the country.
John Adams and John Quincy Adams, James Madison and James Garfield, John Tyler and Martin Van Buren. All were openly bald. What they lacked up top they made up for with ponytails, beards and sideburns, growths that would doom a modern presidential candidate faster than a fling with a hooker named Bambi.
Few bald men have even made a decent run for the presidency since Ike did battle with a fellow baldie, Adlai Stevenson.
George McGovern, it’s true, was so bereft on top that the writer Hunter Thompson described his desperate combover as “the George McGovern alpine rope throw.” But when a man loses as astoundingly as McGovern did to Nixon in 1972, that doesn’t count as a presidential run. That’s a limp.
When Sen. Joe Biden was flirting with a presidential bid, he clearly sensed the nation’s anti-balding bias. He resorted to hair plugs–an affront to the Bald-Headed Men of America, whose motto is “No drugs, plugs or rugs.”
Capps notes that the country is depriving itself by depriving bald men of the presidency.
“If we elected a bald-headed president,” he says, “there’d sure be less coverups.”
![An extra-alarm fire destroyed a home and damaged two others on the near West side Wednesday night, though fire officials said no one was injured in the blaze. The fire broke out around 8:30 p.m. on the 1300 block of West 16th Street in the Pilsen neighborhood, according to a social media update from the Chicago Fire Department. Officials quickly upgraded the blaze to a 2-11 fire. Neighbors who clustered around the scene Wednesday night said the home had been under construction and appeared to be vacant. Although the fire was declared struck out at 9:30 p.m. in a social […]](https://www.chicagotribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ctc-l-structure-fire-041724-06.jpg?w=525 "An extra-alarm fire destroyed a home and damaged two others on the near West side Wednesday night, though fire officials said no one was injured in the blaze. The fire broke out around 8:30 p.m. on the 1300 block of West 16th Street in the Pilsen neighborhood, according to a social media update from the Chicago Fire Department. Officials quickly upgraded the blaze to a 2-11 fire. Neighbors who clustered around the scene Wednesday night said the home had been under construction and appeared to be vacant. Although the fire was declared struck out at 9:30 p.m. in a social […]")
