Project President

by Ben Shapiro

  “You may think that it doesn’t matter to you what color a guy’s hairplugs are, but Shapiro shows that there are seven crucial image factors that can predict who will occupy the White House in 2008.What a fun book!”

  Ann Coulter, Author,

  If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d be Republicans

  “Great fun from a promising young observer of the political scene. Washington meets Hollywood.”

  Susan Estrich, syndicated columnist and author of

  Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church of Hate

  “Witty, insightful, surprising, and consistently entertaining, Ben Shapiro’s irreverent history of Presidential image-making will delight both political junkies and the bemused general public.”

  Michael Medved, nationally syndicated radio talk show host

  and author of Right Turns

  “An entertaining and illuminating romp through the politics of symbolism and personality in our presidential politics. If you’re thinking of running for president, read this book before you spend a dime on a political consultant.”

  Rich Lowry, National Review

  “Think Hillary Clinton’s hair doesn’t matter? Think again. As Ben Shapiro demonstrates in Project President, image is everything in politics. Devastatingly witty and unendingly informative, Project President traces America’s fascination with presidential image-making all the way back to George Washington—and charts the trends forward for the 2008 race. A must-read!”

  Mark Levin, nationally syndicated radio host and author of the

  New York Times bestseller, Men In Black

  “Ben Shapiro’s new book, with good humor and style, makes the case that the right image isn’t always the best thing to have while seeking the Presidency, but it is way ahead of whatever is second. So, wash out your hair gel, take off your make-up, settle down in your bathrobe and explore how candidates and their opponents create portraits than can change the tide of history. Just don’t be photographed looking that way if you ever want to be president.”

  Barry Lynn, Executive Director,

  Americans United for Separation of Church and State

  “Don’t let Ben Shapiro’s irreverent wit and page turning anecdotes fool you. This is a massively researched, much needed, important work of modern history. This exposes our increasingly arcane system for choosing a president. As they say, ‘The devil is in the details.’ ”

  Doug Wead, former White House Staffer and author of the

  New York Times bestseller, All the Presidents’ Children

  “Ben Shapiro’s amusing romp through American history has a serious message: Image has always mattered in presidential politics, and yearning for an imaginary good old days gets us nowhere.”

  Dr. Marvin Olasky, editor-in-chief, World

  “It takes a wise historian to know that small details can make up a more edifying tableau than the big picture. It takes a perceptive historian to know which details are most edifying. And it takes a good writer to present the details in a manner both witty and memorable. Congratulations to Ben Shapiro on all three accomplishments.”

  Eric Burns, author of Infamous Scribblers

  and Fox News host

  “Image, image, image! Ben Shapiro shows that elections have been that way from the start, but in our age of media manipulation, with candidates packaged like deodorant, we can be (and have been) sold a bill of goods. Shapiro’s witty, dark comedy will make you laugh, but it should make you cry.”

  Ray Raphael, author of Founding Myths

  “Ben Shapiro is one of the rising young stars in the conservative firmament, and Project President is yet another proof that his writing, his wit and his exhaustive research will be paying off for the conservative coalition for many years to come.”

  Jeff Babbin, editor of Human Events and

  author of In The Words of Our Enemies

  “Project President is laugh out loud fun. It’s a welcome read during a glum political season. If you want to get to know Abe, Ron, Bill, Jimmy, and Dick up close and personal, this is the book for you.”

  Peter Schweitzer, New York Times bestselling author

  and Hoover Institute Fellow

  “Ben Shapiro’s political analysis, always thoughtful and provocative, puts him in the very small circle of young writers whose work will shape our historical view of current events for decades to come. As part of the new vanguard of historians, Shapiro’s Project President is an important book, and a delightful read from start to finish.”

  Russ Smith, founder of New York Press

  and Baltimore City Paper

  © 2007 by Ben Shapiro

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sale promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shapiro, Ben.

  Project President: Bad Hair and Botox on the Road to the White House / Ben Shapiro.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-59555-100-9

  1. Presidents—United States—Election. 2. United States—Politics and government—Humor. 3. Political campaigns—United States—History. I. Title.

  JK528.S53 2008

  324.973—dc22

  2007023844

  Printed in the United States of America

  07 08 09 10 11 QW 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1: Suits vs. Boots

  2: The Long and Short of It

  3: Taking Bullets for Ballots

  4: Old School vs. New School

  5: The Beer Buddy Syndrome

  6: The Hair Makes the Man

  7: A Woman’s Touch

  8: The Magic Formula

  9: Should Image Matter?

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  SENATOR JOHN F. KERRY (D-Massachusetts) had to feel good on the morning of April 27, 2004. Just four months before, Kerry’s presidential hopes had seemed destined for the incinerator; former governor of Vermont Howard Dean held a seemingly insurmountable lead in several opinion polls in the weeks leading up to the January 19, 2004, Iowa caucuses. In the last week before the caucuses, however, polls saw a sudden spike in support for Kerry.

  And the polls were accurate. On the night of January 19, 2004, John Kerry won a sweeping victory, taking 38 percent of the caucus vote. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was effectively over, crushed at birth; his self-immolation in the immediate aftermath of the Iowa defeat—“Yeeaaargh!”—would become instant campaign legend. Meanwhile, John Kerry would go on to win virtually every other Democratic primary, including a big victory in Pennsylvania on April 27, 2004.

  Kerry had to be confident about his hopes in the general election. He was running as a Vietnam War hero, a champion for the little guy, and a man who could speak truth to power.And he was succeeding. He was, as he dubbed himself after his Iowa win, “comeback Kerry.” General election polls had him running neck and neck with an incumbent president in a time of war—and this was before the late July Democratic National Convention, from which Kerry could expect a sizable bump.

  The world was a marble in John Kerry’s hand.

  Until 12:59 p.m. East
ern Time on April 27, 2004.

  Then disaster struck. For though Senator Kerry was campaigning as an old soldier, a man of principle, a tall, strong, masculine fellow who could outfight, outdebate, and outrank President George W. Bush, he had forgotten one all-important fact: he was an elitist.

  He could rewrite his resumé; he could obscure his Boston Brahmin accent. But he couldn’t change the crucial fact that he was, to the naked eye, a cross between the muppet Beaker and the Marquis de Lafayette. John Kerry looked like a French aristocrat. He sounded like a French aristocrat. He acted like a French aristocrat.

  And, at 12:59 Eastern Time, Matt Drudge of Drudgereport.com broke the most fateful story of the 2004 presidential campaign: John F. Kerry got his hair dressed like a French aristocrat.

  “On the Friday before his Meet the Press appearance,” Drudge reported, “Dem presidential hopeful John Kerry flew his Washington, DC, hairdresser to Pittsburgh for a touch-up, the Drudge Report has learned. Cristophe stylist Isabelle Goetz, who handles Kerry’s hair issues, made the trek to Pittsburgh, campaign sources reveal.

  ‘Her entire schedule had to be rearranged,’ a top source explains. A Kerry campaign spokesman refuses to clarify if Goetz flew by private jet on April 16 or on the official Kerry for President campaign plane.

  The total expense for the hair touch-up is estimated to be more than $1,000, insiders tell Drudge.”1

  The Grey Poupon hit the fan.

  Fox News quickly confirmed the $1,000 haircut, and Brit Hume reported on April 28: “In an incident reminiscent of one of the great embarrassments of the Clinton presidency, John Kerry managed to have his hair styled while out of town last week, and he got it done by the same hair salon the Clintons used. The former president, you may recall, kept Air Force 1 waiting on the tarmac in Los Angeles, 11 years ago this month, while Christophe of Beverly Hills came aboard and cut his hair. Christophe later opened a salon in Washington and one of his stylists, French-educated Isabel [sic] Goetz, does Kerry’s hair as well as Hillary Clinton’s.”2 The French Clinton. Not quite what Kerry was going for.

  The $1,000 haircut became juicy fodder for late-night comics. “John Kerry, does he support gay marriage? Here’s a hint: He gets thousand-dollar haircuts,” quipped Craig Kilborn.3 Jay Leno jibed, “$1,000 for a haircut. Which sounds like a lot, but have you seen the size of John Kerry’s head?”4 And David Letterman joked, “The campaign for the White House is heating up with John Kerry taking heat for throwing his Vietnam medals away, getting a $1,000 haircut, and wearing a 1970s wig known as ‘the Leno.’ There are really two sides to this story. And America can’t wait for Kerry to present both of them.”5

  For the next six months, John Kerry’s hair—and by extension, his elitism—became the central focus of the 2004 presidential campaign. On June 1, the Republican National Committee released an online game entitled Kerryopoly. One of the squares on the board: John Kerry’s $1,000 haircut. “Most Americans can’t afford yachts, private planes, thousand dollar haircuts or homes in Nantucket. But they can when they play Kerryopoly,” poked RNC communications director Jim Dyke.6

  “John Kerry tries to put a bunch of fancy, fancy talk—tried to disguise that record, sort of like his fancy haircut, fancy manicure, tried to disguise the whole thing,” remarked the vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney, at a Kerry/Bush debate-watching party in October. “But there is nothing you can do to really—to really obscure that record. You can try, though. And in Wyoming, we’ve got a saying for what it is when you keep trying to make something that’s not so good look good, we call it putting lipstick on a pig.”7

  Unbelievably, Kerry continued to shoot himself in the Versace-covered foot throughout the campaign. After he chose immaculately coiffed Senator John Edwards (D-North Carolina) as his running mate, Kerry remarked, “We’ve got better ideas. We’ve got great plans. We’ve got a better sense of what’s happening in America. And we’ve got better hair.” Kerry repeated the joke in Ohio and Florida.8 Apparently Karl Rove was now writing John Kerry’s lines.

  Rove was also designing Kerry’s photo ops. In three disastrous weeks, Kerry laminated his status as the Cannes Film Festival’s presidential pick. On July 30, the Kerry and Edwards couples visited a Wendy’s to celebrate the Edwardses’ wedding anniversary, down-home style. Except that both couples left after a few minutes of posing for the cameras and returned to the campaign bus, where they had gourmet food awaiting them—“shrimp vindaloo, grilled diver sea scallops, prosciutto-wrapped stuffed chicken—all prepared by a Culinary Institute of America–trained chef.” The all-too-predictable Marie Antoinette–invoking headline from the New York Post: “Let Them Eat Ketchup.”9 “The Kerry’s [sic] and the Edwards’ [sic] went to Wendy’s the other day for lunch,” said Jay Leno. “They made a big deal, oh, ‘we’re regular people going to Wendy’s. We’re going to go to Wendy’s.’ But when they got back they secretly had a gourmet meal delivered from a nearby yacht club. So I guess there really are two Americas, and they just don’t like the food in the poorer one. That’s basically the problem.”10

  Then, on August 11, Kerry visited Pat’s Steaks in Philadelphia and ordered a Philly cheesesteak. With Swiss cheese.11 Which is like ordering a hot dog at a ballgame with caviar on the side.

  And, finally, the kicker. Kerry was a windsurfer. In January 2004, Kerry campaigners began handing out copies of a 1998 American Windsurfer magazine with Kerry on the cover.12 This was already about as smart as handing out photographs of Kerry wearing a beret and sipping absinthe at a small café off of the Champs-Élysées. But Kerry wasn’t done. The week of August 10, Kerry again had his hairdresser flown across the country, from Washington,D.C., to Portland, Oregon, in order to prepare Kerry for a windsurfing photo op. The photo op blew over, but Kerry would later go ahead with a similar photo op, his giant, French-pouf hair flying in the wind.13 Pictures of Kerry windsurfing were plastered all over the Internet. He strongly resembles a slightly frazzled and thoroughly wet Pepé Le Pew.

  On November 2, Senator John Kerry lost the presidential election by a hair.

  MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE that our style of campaigning is broken. “Why,” they ask, “should John Kerry’s $1,000 haircut decide who holds the most powerful office on the face of the earth? Shouldn’t politics be about politics? Shouldn’t policy be the crux of our campaigns and elections? What does it matter if Barry Goldwater looked kooky in glasses or if Michael Dukakis looked goofy in a tank?”

  It matters. Just ask Goldwater or Dukakis. These things have always mattered.We live in a visual world. As did the physiogamists of old, we like to think we can read a person’s character by looking at him. A person’s character is written “all over him.” But isn’t true beauty on the inside? As Jim Carrey puts it in Liar, Liar, “That’s just something ugly people say.”

  When we vote, we vote not for a platform but for a person. And we judge our presidential candidates the same way we judge everyone else: based on the whole package.

  Science says we make decisions about people within seconds of meeting them. According to a series of experiments by Princeton University psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, people make hair-trigger judgments—we typically judge whether people are attractive, likable, competent, trustworthy, and aggressive all within less than one tenth of one second. Those judgments rarely change, even after people take more time to reconsider.14

  Willis’s and Todorov’s findings are seconded by Michael Sunnafrank of the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Sunnafrank’s research showed that we often decide whether we like or hate people within minutes of meeting them. “It happens so rapidly it’s amazing,” said Sunnafrank. “It just astounded me that after all that opportunity [to reconsider], there was such a continuing strong impact of those first impressions.”15

  This doesn’t mean that impressions can’t change over time—after all, Richard Nixon was elected in 1968. And it doesn’t mean that policy doesn’t matter—George Clooney could run for president tomorro
w and lose big.

  It does mean, however, that presidential candidates may only have one shot to convince voters that they should be president. To do so, they must package their background, positions, and looks into a convincing whole. And they must sell that image every hour of every minute of every day. As Roger Ailes, the former campaign aide to victorious presidential candidates Richard Nixon (1968), Ronald Reagan (1984), and George H.W. Bush (1988) put it, “You can have the greatest head of hair in the world, or the greatest smile, or the greatest voice, or whatever, but after two minutes you’re going to be looked at as a whole person. All of those impressions of your various parts will have been blended into one complete composite picture, and the other person will have a feeling about you based on that total impression. Enough of that image has to be working in your favor for you to be liked, accepted, and given what you want.”16

  It is this necessity to “package the whole” that makes electoral campaigning such a long, arduous—and necessary—process. No man can hide who he is for months on end. Who the candidate is comes across clearly in speeches, in television ads, and at meet-and-greet dinners.When Jimmy Carter tried to portray Ronald Reagan as a radical extremist, he failed miserably—not because Reagan’s politics were all that different from Barry Goldwater’s, but because Ronald Reagan was a different person than Barry Goldwater. After Reagan’s election, campaign advertising historian Kathleen Hall Jamieson reported that a Hollywood producer approached Carter media advisor Gerald Rafshoon and told him “that he should have known better than to try to portray Reagan as dangerous and insensitive. ‘Let me tell you something,’ said the producer. ‘Ronald Reagan is not a good actor. I’ve known him for years and he’s not a good actor. But he played in fifty-nine movies and in all but one he played the same role and that was of a sincere guy. Now, as I say, he is not a great actor but he knows how to play sincere people. And you should have known better. If you play sincere people in fifty-nine roles, it’s got to rub off.’ ”17

  The producer had it exactly backward. Reagan played sincere people because he was a sincere person. Every biography tells the same story about Ronald Reagan—he was a man who got along well with people, who generally said what he thought. Ronald Reagan was genuine and the American people got it. They voted based on it.