Excuse me if a Diary like this has already been posted, but here we go anyhow.
What should be the criteria for all our presidential elections? Policies? Nope. Assets? Nope. Personality? Nope. Values? Of course not. It's all about how damn sexy they are. No I'm seriously not joking, the better-looking candidate of the race WILL win.
So before the 2004 election when I was spreading the word about Kerry, about how he's much better than Bush and about how he'll win, a friend of mine (an anti-government conservative, whose positions often fall in the democratic category) disagreed. He said that even though Bush was a horrible president (and wasn't impressed with Kerry either), he said that he could guarantee me that Bush would come out as the victor on November 2nd. His reasoning behind it, however, is what shocked me. He told me that the better-looking candidate would always emerge the victor. I first thought this was a ridiculous concept, but after thinking it through, hey, it was true.
Overall, most people agreed in 2004 that Bush was better looking than Kerry (Monkey vs. Frankenstein, but Kerry needed Butox). 2000, Gore was balding and therefore lost. 1996 and 1992, Clinton was far more attractive than Dole, Bush, or Perot. 1984 and 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Mondale and Carter, whom he was probably better looking than both (albeit older). Carter defeated the bull Ford in `76; Nixon defeated the balding McGovern and Humphrey in '72 and '68. Need I continue?
But the one that threw me off the most was 1988. I told him that Dukakis was better looking than Bush sr., but then he said "you really think he was better looking than him when he was 5 foot 4?" which I could not refute. He was right: the American public is shallow and pathetic enough to the point that in all presidential elections (at least in the post-WW2 time period), the better-looking candidate would always win. I suppose that American Politics is all about image after all.
This isn't such a bad thing, however, since we have now acknowledged the pattern of the American people. This is why in 2008 we should field a good-looking candidate to ensure victory. Let's look at our possibilities:
Evan Bayh
Joe Biden
Wesley Clark
Russ Feingold
Hillary Clinton
Bill Richardson
Tom Vilsack
Mark Warner
John Kerry
John Edwards
(and no, I'm not including Boxer, Dean, Gore, Obama, or Schweitzer. I love them all to death, but they either are definitely not running[Dean, Obama] via commitment, have shown little or no intention of running, have too small a record, or just do not want to run)
So we can already divide the list into 3 categories:
Low-risk candidates:
Evan Bayh (has his father's looks)
Russ Feingold (young and relatively good looking)
Mark Warner (has that Clintonesque governor pretty boy look)
John Edwards (that's what everyone thought of him in 2004)
Medium-risk candidates:
Hillary Clinton (well you couldn't really consider her good looking, but she's not that bad looking... if only she ran for office in 1992)
Wesley Clark (Not good looking, but not necessarily bad either)
Guys that are going to lose no matter what:
Joe Biden (ha, no Joementum after all!)
Tom Vilsack (butt-ugly)
Bill Richardson (breaks mirrors)
John Kerry (lost once as proof, he'll just age and become more and more uglier)
So those are our options. Based on winning the presidency, the top 3 will more than likely win, while the medium-risk ones have a decent shot at it. All to do now is take the top 4-6 candidates and divide them up by policy, to now determine what you want in the president.
