Just look at the recent headlines and you can see that the nomination of John Bolton as UN Ambassador is in serious trouble.
With each day, and each news cycle, Bolton seems to be losing more and more support. Why is this so?
Is it due to his apparent reputation as an abusive boss? Is it due to former Secretary of State Colin Powell being in the background giving wavering GOP Senators the thumbs down when asked about Bolton? Is it due to his controversial past statements. Is it just pure, partisan politics as President George Bush suggests?
No, we think it’s something else: he is suffering from The Curse Of The Weird Facial Hair.
There was a time in American history when you almost had to have facial hair to get elected. That’s why over the years a woman was never elected President, because they wouldn’t qualify — except perhaps the late Bella Abzug.
Abraham Lincoln, the great Teddy Roosevelt — all had facial hair and won. But their facial hair didn’t look weird on them.
Bolton has weird facial hair. Right now he looks like he has a future doing Quaker Oats commercials as a younger, slimmer incarnation of actor and Quaker Oats spokesman Wilford Brimely.
Bolton should either dye his hair white or his mustache light brown. Or he should shave his moustache and hair, and he could then pass for Jeff Gannon — and get a White House press room day pass.
Bolton’s plummeting political fortunes are reminiscent of what happened to another man with weird facial hair — Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.
They say the by-all-accounts brilliant Bork was rejected because of his strict-constructionist views, his role in firing Archibald Cox in Richard Nixon’s infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” during the Watergate scandal, and by a Democratic party vendetta but we all know what the REAL REASON WAS:
He had weird facial hair.
Bork’s whiskers looked like he was trying to look like Abraham Lincoln. And failing. Badly.
As in the case of Bork, wavering Senators and people who are not on the partisan-support bandwagon look at Bolton, diverted from his arguments, thinking:“Rats! I can’t concentrate on anything he’s saying or anyone else is saying. If I only had a razor, even a cheap one — just for a few seconds. Or some hair dye. Or mustache dye.”
So Bork looked like a bad Lincoln wannabe; Bolton looks like a slimmer version of an Oatmeal salesman.
Maybe Bolton will be approved if the next time he testifies he looks right at the Senators and squarely into camera and uses the famous Quaker Oats slogan:
“Confirm me,” he should say. “It’s the right thing to do.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.