[poochee]

Is America Ready for a Bald President?
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
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.

That so little has been made of this subject should strike political observers as a curious thing. For all the squeamishness that surrounds the subject, baldness (to employ a favorite journalistic cliché of mine) is big business. Some estimates place the over-the-counter traffic in hair-loss treatment and restoration products at $7 billion per year, with untold additional sums spent on research and development, lobbying and litigation, not to mention hat sales and insurance payouts stemming from botched surgical procedures.

Dollar figures do not even begin to convey the extent to which this subject pervades our society at large. The Beatles made long hair acceptable for American men, and baldness a liability of sorts in the post-1960s culture. In "Don’t You Just Hate That: 738 Annoying Things," a wry and amusing catalog of life’s bummers and irritations published by (full disclosure: my close friend) Scott Cohen in 2004, the author, who is losing his hair, laments both how “we judge men by the choices they make in how they deal with their baldness.”

There’s really no competition between the Andre Agassi and Bruce Willis approach, or David Lee Roth’s, is there? And Simon and Garfunkel “both went bald.”

A visitor to the Web site www.baldrus.com further laments how many men equate hair loss with “a life destroying illness.” The site maintains a “Bald Hall of Fame” with such gleaming, and presumably involuntary, inductees as Agassi, Sean Connery, G. Gordon Liddy, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and actor Ving Rhames — but not, curiously, Mike Tyson or Michael Jordan.

In most journalistic treatments of this issue, this would be about the time for a pun, but I’ll abstain in the interests of (Mr.) clean prose. See? I couldn’t help myself. And I should know better. The chairman and CEO of the very company that employs me is bald, and he may not find any of this particularly amusing. He’s a very smart man and I know for a fact none of this humor will go ... over his head.

But is it an issue in presidential politics, you ask? Consider that we’ve not voted into office a bald commander-in-chief since that most commanding of figures, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Gerald R. Ford was by all accounts a good and decent man, but he was never elected president and was only partially bald.

Excerpt from: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,261825,00.html

[oldie]

I love you too

[bonzobob999]

Whats wrong with being bald then?

[poochee]

Originally Posted by bonzobob999

Whats wrong with being bald then?

Nothing IMO, but it's an interesting topic.

[poochee]

Originally Posted by oldie

I love you too

[hannab]

as long as he looked as hot as Yul.

[bonzobob999]

Originally Posted by poochee

Nothing IMO, but it's an interesting topic.

LOL *Blush* so whats you take on the cause of baldness. *tongue in cheek*

[lotuseclat79]

Bald men are thought to have a high testosterone level in their blood over hairy men. I don't know whether that's fact or fiction.

Do we really need more testosterone in the WH? Actually, women can at times be just as dangerous than men. Didn't Maggie Thatcher defend the Falkland Islands off Argentina in the 80s from invasion? It was a war and Maggie led the charge!

Oh well, if Hillary wins in 2008, and subsequently gets cancer we may yet have a bald POTUS.

-- Tom

[Rockn]

Originally Posted by poochee

Nothing IMO, but it's an interesting topic.

The poochee seal of disapproval......

[hannab]

Now come Rockn, it's time you came up with your own seal of disapproval

this

or maybe this

we can have it trademarked for you, just ask Wacor

[poochee]

Originally Posted by hannab

as long as he looked as hot as Yul.

Yeah!!

[hannab]

Originally Posted by poochee

Yeah!!

Quite

[poochee]

Just remember, Bald is Beautiful!!

[bonzobob999]

Originally Posted by poochee

Just remember, Bald is Beautiful!!

Yup! I think your right.

[poochee]

Originally Posted by bonzobob999

Yup! I think your right.

Yep!