Several years ago, I had a conversation with the political commentator Jeff Greenfield about how the personal appearance of candidates affects elections. Most of our conversation focused on facial hair, and its almost total disappearance among political candidates, especially among those for national or state-wide office. Jeff thought the fashion against facial hair would be an impediment for a candidate–it connoted things like artsiness, intellectualism, and wilyness, characteristics at odds with the image of sobriety, steadfastness and conventionality we favor in politicians–but that it wasn’t a disqualifier. As proof, he pointed to Jon Corzine (above), at the time Senator and now Governor of New Jersey. But Jeff thought there was a disqualifier: fat. Voters would probably never say it, but the ideal of fitness had become so ingrained that a fat candidate would carry a significant handicap.
Well, we’re getting a test of this theory this fall. In New Jersey, the Republican opponent of the hirsute Governor Corzine is a former US Attorney named Chris Christie, who leads Corzine by three points in the latest poll. Now, I have never seen Christie in person, but if you look at anti-Christie attack ads (such as this one produced by the DNC), you’ll see a guy who is–no two ways about it–fat. And if you look Christie’s intentionally flattering website, you’ll see a guy who is at the very least big. Husky, as clothing salesmen so delicately put it. The sort of guy who looks like he was an offensive lineman in college, and is now several years and a desk job and a lot of mayonnaise away from the line of scrimmage. I’m guessing that like a lot of us, Christie goes up and down.
Which sets up a fascinating election, one in which voters will tell us that issues matter, that records matter, that party affiliation matters, but that the only thing they’ll be thinking about in the privacy of the voting booth is whether they prefer the fat guy or the hairy guy.
