Who cares if the next president is bald?

I suppose it's the job of a journalist to be able to write great articles about the most banal of subjects. They must groan inside, sometimes. Burning with 'change the world' passion, they turn up for work and get given "is the world ready for a bald president". Better, perhaps, than the Daily Mail journalist who recently was paid to wonder where a strawberry might go on holiday (and how that compares to a raspberry), but still.

With just 100 months left to save the planet and the financial convulsion of the century to handle, who has the brainspace left to care whether the next president of the US is bald or not?

But that's just it. That's exactly the very serious point.

Two big trends have made the bald president thing serious.

The first is tv. The idea is that no US president has been bald since most people got a tv. That, in itself, probably isn't a big deal.

Probably the driving force is actually what used to be called the information age. Time was America, land of the free, of unfettered capitalism battled communism, two big ideas locking horns over the Atlantic. Nowadays we have access to so much information that policy isn't driven by ideology any more, it's done by focus groups and demographic analysis.

Since all parties have access to pretty much the same data, the differences between the parties become smaller, and it all starts to turn on image. Here in the UK, the idea is that Labor is historically for ordinary working people 'downwards' to those living on benefits, while the Conservatives are for aspirational people 'upwards' to the public school crowd. Is that true any more? They would probably like us to think so, but when it comes to election time it's often hard to discern the policy differences. Faced with a real lack of choice, what's anyone to do but to choose the one they like the best. And that's down to image.

It's hard to remember, but there was a time when politicians were chosen for their politics. The tipping point in British politics was probably when Michael Foot turned up to the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph wearing a jacket which he'd wrongly buttoned up. I remember that as the main contribution to the feeling that he'd taken insufficient care of his appearance, but the Internet remembers more that his choice of donkey jacket was the issue. Anyway, he lost the next election. And what else does anyone remember about Michael Foot? A lifetime of intelligent dedication to socialism usurped by a momentary poor image which the opposition, of course, used relentlessly against him.

Logically, one might think the reason he'd taken less time than others to look good might be because he was working hard on running the country. But even then, it smacks of poor judgment or poor management. If you're running the country nowadays, it's not about your ideology, you just need to be in control, to delegate effectively, to be on top form. And there it is: "you need to be on top form".

Comedian Frankie Boyle neatly summarized Brown's position by imagining how Bush might see him: "he probably thinks Blair's put on weight and had a mild stroke".

No one wants to feel that the person running the country is ill or out of control or under pressure or unable to handle the job. Actually, image turns out to be everything.

John Allsopp's blog
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