Political websites are currently erupting with the charge that John Kerry has had Botox injections in his face, especially his forehead. May I be among the first to ask, "Who cares?"
I've decided. I'm going to cast my presidential vote for whichever candidate runs on what they're actually going to do for the next four years, as opposed to trying to convince us that "there's something wrong" with the other guy. There actually may be something wrong with the other guy, at least in the sense that there's probably something wrong with anyone who wants to be President. But if Kerry's the nominee, I don't want to listen to months of hearing about his hair and his long face and how he almost looks French. Just as I don't want to hear that Bush's ability to scramble sentence structures proves that he's stupid. No, it doesn't prove that. Nor does it tell us a lot about a man that he was born into privilege or that he keeps marrying into it. To me, when they're bringing that kind of stuff up, it's because they don't have anything intellectually honest to say about the stuff that matters. (This also applies to trying to make the election about trivial issues like school uniforms, burning the American flag, steroid use by athletes and maybe even going to Mars. The space effort itself is not trivial but it is when it's not going to receive sufficient funding to actually do something.)
This personal crap is not new to politics. In the first presidential race I was old enough to follow, some were trying to make an issue of Kennedy's religion while others were telling us Nixon was too shifty-eyed to trust. Then Johnson was a wimp, whereas Goldwater was so pathological about Communism that he was going to get us into a nuclear war…and so on. It's a sad commentary on the American electorate that right this minute, there are strategists sitting around, trying to figure out how to market the notion that an opponent has serious psychological problems and/or that how he dresses, what he eats or other details of his life prove "he's not one of us." I don't think anyone who has ever gotten seriously near the presidency is "one of us." If you think they are, you're probably one of those people who thought John Wayne was a war hero, O.J. Simpson was a great role model, or that when Rock Hudson wasn't making movies, he was out banging hot chicks.