CAMPAIGN 2004
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
John Kerry was in Vietnam. And boy, that's some haircut!
John Kerry's hairdresser continues to make waves in Washington. The news that the Massachusetts senator, Democratic presidential candidate, Vietnam veteran, Big Ketchup spouse, Vietnam veteran, amateur guitarist, Vietnam veteran and Vietnam veteran gets a $75 coiffure from Cristophe has riveted the Beltway and distracted from his message. ("As a Vietnam veteran, I know what it's like to wake up in a jungle full of terrifying bangs." "So it was tough finding a good salon over there?")
To be honest, it's not entirely obvious where the 75 bucks goes. I mean, I haven't seen the back of his head in awhile, so it's possible he has an attractively angled nape. Otherwise, the most likely explanation is that it's 15 bucks for the stuff on top but he pays $30 per eyebrow for some Ann Miller industrial-strength lacquer that freezes them into that permanently furrowed look.
For a politician as perpetually concerned as Sen. Kerry, this is money well spent. Come the New Hampshire primary, when the candidates are doing their grip-and-grins high atop Mount Washington, Al Gore will be howling in agony as the 200-mile-an-hour winds rip the chest hair out of his low-cut olive polo shirt and scatter it like confetti over gay weddings in neighboring Vermont, but Mr. Kerry's furrowed brow will be as attractively immobile as ever. The Kerry candidacy is such an obvious disaster waiting to happen that it seems a shame to wait for it to happen.
The reason Al Gore isn't in the White House today is because of the cultural disconnect between him and Southern rural white males. Though officially running as a Tennessee farmer, he was perceived as an elite Massachusetts liberal. Replacing him with a real elite Massachusetts liberal seems unlikely to return Tennessee, Arkansas and West Virginia to the fold. As for the notion, promoted by many respected political analysts, that Mr. Kerry, being from Massachusetts, would have an edge in the New Hampshire primary, that betrays a somewhat hazy grasp of the relationship between the Granite State and its southern neighbor. In 2004, Granite State Democrats will be looking to recover from the hammering they got last month, when a pro-tax gubernatorial candidate dragged the rest of the ticket down with him. Elevating a Massachusetts liberal who wants to raise taxes is not the best way to do that.
Now already I can hear Sen. Kerry frothing like a vat of Alberto Balsam on Don King's head: "I don't want to raise taxes. I just want to repeal the tax cuts you were expecting to get but haven't yet. It's not the same!" To which I say: Whatever, dude. But personally I'd save the hair-splitting for Cristophe. By the time you've spent 20 minutes explaining why your tax hike isn't really a tax hike, the only two words anyone's going to remember are "tax" and "hike."
And this is where the hair comes in. A lot of solemn Democratic operatives have deplored the Beltway obsession with Mr. Kerry's $75 hair care. It's much nothing about a 'do, they say; just another of the media's Drudge-fueled descents into gossip and trivia. True, and that's good enough for me. But, if I have to come up with a highfalutin gloss to justify the story, I'd say it's this: The haircut catches the fancy because it seems to cut to the essence of the Kerry candidacy, whose problem as a whole is that it's overstyled. Platform-wise, every strand feels as if it's been exquisitely combed and parted to the finest calibration.
The senator's opposed to the death penalty. Fair enough. A lot of folks have a visceral revulsion at the principle of state execution. But whoa, hang on, no, that's not it. He's not some milksop Dukakis type. Mr. Kerry's opposed to the death penalty because it's too wimpy. "Putting somebody to sleep on a gurney" isn't cruel enough for Mr. Kerry's tastes. Keep him in jail watching cable TV decade after decade. "That is tough, my friend," says Mr. Kerry, not like dying, which--in case he hasn't mentioned it this sound bite--is something he knows a lot about: Only gutless pansy types let these killers off easy by sending 'em to Old Sparky. This is Mr. Kerry's answer to compassionate conservatism: sadistic liberalism.
In this ingenious policy coiffure, the crime strand alone parts to both left and right--and forward and backward, too. It turns out the senator's in favor of the death penalty, but only for terrorists. And that would be--following Mr. Kerry's own logic--because your average al Qaeda guy deserves a less tough punishment than someone who shoots his wife? Er, well, that's not important. What's important is that "I, in a war, was prepared to kill in defense of my nation."
I always enjoy the bit at the end of the haircut where the stylist holds up the hand mirror so you can see the back and sides. The trouble with Mr. Kerry's policies, as the mirror of the one hand reflects the mirror of the other hand reflects the mirror of the first hand, is that it's all back and sides and no front and center. Bill Clinton got away with this approach, but today it seems tonally at odds with the electorate. President Bush is certainly not undefeatable, but what is certain is that he won't be defeated by a politician whose gut instinct is to have no gut instincts.
Mr. Kerry has never held an original position for longer than it took his party's interest groups to put the squeeze on him. The Democrats suffered last month because they were perceived on the central issues of war and national security as, at best, tentative and, worse, opportunist. The senator seems set to expand this losing formula from the war to every major policy area, until the entire Democratic platform has achieved the perfect snapped-seesaw symmetry of his eyebrows.
Even the "Good Morning, Night and Noon, Vietnam" talk falls into this category. If the hair clippings are Matt Drudge's fault, Mr. Kerry has only himself to blame for turning his war record into a running joke. How long can he go on any subject before bringing up Nam? Senator, is it true you dye your hair? "I was ready to die for my country, which is more than a lot of Republicans were."
There's something a little goofy about a man so convinced his service in Vietnam was morally wrong that he stood on the steps of the Capitol and threw away his medals (well, OK, some other guy's medals) now claiming it as the central, if not sole, event in his résumé. You can understand why. Much of the rest--Swiss finishing schools, Michael Dukakis's lieutenant-governor--is even less marketable. But again it's slightly out of tune. The 2002 election was a disaster for candidates trying to coast on biography--Jean Carnahan, Walter Mondale, Max Cleland. The public proved more mature: The personal isn't that political; serving your country in Vietnam is an honorable thing but politically irrelevant if you've got no coherent position on the current war. Indeed, Mr. Kerry's current explanation for his vote against the last Gulf War--"the country was still very divided. . . . I was not against using force. I was against moving so precipitously that we didn't have the consent"--is almost a parody of the modern Democrat's inability to rise above poll-testing.
So what does that leave? If you're in search of bold policy positions, the Kerry message is forget the war and taxes and let's get down to the real issues of real concern to real voters--like "a high-speed rail," which is one of "the things we need to do to excite the economy of our country." If we'd spent more on light rail infrastructure, it wouldn't matter if a president shut down traffic control at Los Angeles International Airport so he could get a $200 haircut on the runway, because everybody else would be on the 4:07 to Buffalo via Phoenix, Grand Forks, Oklahoma City and Duluth.
This then is the first semideclared Democratic candidate's strategy: Huff about how your tax hike isn't a tax hike. Talk about cleaning up America's rivers. Keep mentioning Vietnam. Lather, rinse, repeat. If you were to create an animatronic Democrat to exemplify all the most disastrous qualities of the 2002 election--the equivocating, the fundamental unseriousness, the reliance on biography even when no one's interested--it would look an awful lot like John Kerry. His friends are right: the hair is a nonissue. But this is a noncampaign, so what else is there? Or as William Randolph Hearst would say: Remember the mane!
Mr. Steyn, a columnist for London's Daily Telegraph and Canada's National Post, is the author of "The Face Of The Tiger" (Stockade Books, 2002).
