Word: baldly
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When President John F. Kennedy went hatless during his Inauguration speech in 1961, he committed in essence a double homicide: of the hat industry and of the prospect that any bald man would ever have to the nation's highest office...
...present presidential campaign, some of Giuliani's rivals have receded (John McCain), and some have even reseeded (Joe Biden, whose scalp is less spartan than it used to be), but none are nakedly, unabashedly bald. Not even Homer Simpson, who announced his candidacy to David Letterman and combs his pair of hairs to the right, a two-string comb-over that still leaves him two strings shy of a ukulele...
Hair is, quite literally, political cover. The emperor may have no clothes, but he damn sure better have a comb. Charles the Bald, the 17 century King of France and Holy Roman Emperor, was not bald but fully maned, to judge by the portraits and coins of the day. The nickname was evidently ironic, the way 300-lb. members of Hells Angels frequently answer to "Tiny...
...wish it weren't so. As a bald man, I long for a President who is, in the words of the English poet Matthew Arnold, "bald as the bare mountaintops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." This is the baldness of Sean Connery or Michael Jordan or Buddha...
...bald man has been voted into the White House in 12 elections. (Gerald Ford doesn't count. And neither does Dick Cheney.) Before Ike, you have to go all the way back to the election of 1836 and Martin Van Buren. But his white sideburns were so overcompensating--two enormous parentheses bracketing the nonrestrictive clause of his face--that he is seldom thought of as bald...