Posted on 08/17/2004 12:59:28 PM PDT by finnigan2
Lloyd Grove has a neat item in The New York Daily News, the sort of Kerry story that turns up every day now when he’s now getting mired further in his own Vietnam fantasy quagmire. Flying your stylist across a continent to perk you up for a windsurfing shoot is fine if you’re Hollywood or royalty, but how did the Dems end up with a cross between Colonel Kurtz and Princess Di? Here’s what Grove says:
I hear that when Kerry was in Portland, Ore., last weekend preparing to windsurf on the Columbia River Gorge, he flew his Washington-based hairstylist, Isabelle Goetz, across the country to give him a camera-ready trim.
A knowledgeable source told me that the French-born Goetz - who tends the Massachusetts senator's mane while also caring for Sen. Hillary Clinton's coiffure - caught up with the candidate in Portland on Friday (after flying commercial, I'm told), trimmed his luxuriant salt-and-pepper locks and then returned to Washington the same night.
But because of light breezes on Saturday, Kerry's windsurfing photo op never came off.
It was unclear yesterday how much the haircut cost, or who paid: the husband of Heinz ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz Kerry or the Kerry campaign. Kerry communications director Stephanie Cutter didn't respond to my detailed E-mail and voice-mail messages.
Goetz - who's a popular and busy woman in the Washington salon of celebrity-stylist Cristophe - told The Washington Post three years ago that she typically charged Kerry $75 for a haircut. But that 2001 fee would not have included a last-minute round-trip plane ticket (today around $1,450 for a coach seat on American Airlines) or a whole day of Goetz's valuable time.
John Kerry’s hair is favorite turf of mine. This is from Mark Steyn From Head To Toe:
Lather, rinse, repeat
December 11th 2002 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’s 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 hard to find a decent 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 Senator 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 per 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.
On the other hand, it could be confusing if some cranky guy in plaid asks the Senator if he’d like to go out hunting for moose. “Er, no thanks. I’m perfectly happy with my regular styling gel.”
The Kerry candidacy is such an obvious disaster waiting to happen that it seems a shame to have to wait for it to happen. It hardly seems possible that Republicans could get lucky enough to have a Democratic primary contest between Al Gore and John Kerry, slugging it out in debate after debate with laboriously self-deprecating gags, one about his woodenness, the other about his lack of warmth:
“I was proud. To take the lead. In inventing Viagra. Unfortunately. I. Took. One. Too. Many.”
“That’s nothing. My coiffeuse said, ‘Do you want your hair frosted?’ I said, ‘No, just the rest of me.’ Hur-hur.”
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. Especially an elite Massachusetts liberal committed to raising your taxes.
Now already I can hear Senator 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’s. 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 over-styled. 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. Kerry’s opposed to the death penalty because it’s too wimpy. “Putting somebody to sleep on a gurney”, as he puts it, isn’t cruel enough for Kerry’s tastes. Keep him in jail watching cable TV decade after decade. “That is tough, my friend,” says Kerry, not like dying, which – in case he hasn’t mentioned it this soundbite – is something he knows a lot about: “I’ve seen people die and I know what it’s like to almost die.”
Real men don’t fry. Only gutless pansy types let these killers off easy by sending ’em to Old Sparky. This is Kerry’s answer to compassionate conservatism: sadistic liberalism.
As the great thespian Sir Donald Wolfit said on his deathbed, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” But the comedy in Kerry’s campaign is effortless. In this ingenious policy coiffure, the crime strand alone parts to both left and right – and forwards and backwards, too. It turns out the senator is in favor of the death penalty, but only for terrorists. And that would be – following 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 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 could have got away with this approach, but today it seems tonally at odds with the electorate: 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 Drudge’s fault, 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 the other side were.”
The politics of war is complicated: the media couldn’t care less about Bob Dole, a genuine hero who suffered appalling physical injury in a great cause – big deal. John McCain was an incompetent combatant whose brain got fried by the gooks in a lost cause – and the media boomers loved him. Kerry is trying to channel McCain, but he won’t pull it off. For a start, 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, okay, some other guy’s medals) now claiming it as the central, if not sole, event in his resume. You can understand why. Much of the rest – Swiss finishing schools, Dukakis’ 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 – the Widow 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, Kerry’s latest 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 LAX traffic control 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 semi-declared 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 non-issue. But this is a non-campaign, so what else is there? Or as William Randolph Hearst would say: Remember the mane!
another shot at kerry from a columnist in Mort Zuckerman's NY Daily News...I repeat my fearless prediction, made three months ago, the the News will endorse Bush..
I haven't read the article yet, but I love the title!
read later
You need to put that at the top! It was too late when I read it. 8-)
ROTFL!
I wish I had his command for the English language as he has. This article is a classic, humorous, and right-on!
It is not every day you read a word that is both new and hilarious in and of itself.
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 per 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.
This is over the top, even for Steyn. Bump, bump, bump.
BTTT
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Tegrin spelled backwards is Nirget...
-Phoebe Buffay
Colonel Kurtz or Colonel Klink? Maybe a bit of both.
John F*ckin's biography is all pablum no passion and signifies nothing. Leave it to the inimitable Mark Steyn to reveal the Emperor Has No Clothes. At times it seems Kerry's perpetually stuck in the washing machine. That coupled with his penchant to stick his foot in his mouth, makes for a lousiest father of all candidates. He and his party think running on Vietnam will absolve them of the need to address the problems of the past 3 1/2 years. They think Americans are terminally stupid and the polls seem to show Americans will buy just about anything. Come November 2nd, all the biography in the world will fail to aid Kerry in his efforts to reach the White House. He can compare notes with another highly decorated veteran named Bob Dole after its all over.
One of the best pieces I've read on the 2004 election. So well done . . .
Scandal, Investigate, Poll, Repeat
God...did he hit a home run again? YES YES YES...I love you Mark!!!!
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