What makes powerful men embrace the world's lamest do? Twang those glistening strands and you'll hear a strange song about virility, status and even death.
A few weeks ago, I found myself at a party at an exclusive club several flights above the streets of Manhattan. It was a really bad party — a TV industry event that felt obligatory rather than celebratory, despite the free-flowing booze. Some low-level celebrities were sprinkled here and there — I had a pleasant talk with Harold, though Kumar was a no-show — but I was most intrigued by a paunchy guy with a graying swoop of hair curled around his head like stray mop fiber. This guy was loud and obnoxious, but still I tracked his movements around the room and followed his conversations, all the while wondering why I was so perversely interested in him. Then I realized: It was the combover.
Admitting you love the combover is a little embarrassing. (Just ask the guy who spent nearly two years working on the yet-to-be-distributed “Combover: The Movie.”) After all, the combover of today is the mullet of yesteryear: unloved — “In all the hairdressing books I’ve looked at, I’ve never seen anything about it,” says hair historian Steve Zdatny, a professor at West Virginia University — universally derided, and an increasingly rare example of unchecked, unironic bad taste. (And thanks to Rogaine et al., it’s increasingly rare.) Unlike the mullet, though, the combover isn’t likely to undergo that so-bad-it’s-good makeover, simply because, at least for now, most hipsters aren’t bald. But in an era when even haircuts are postmodern, there is much to recommend the purity of a look that aims to mislead so naively. It’s almost charming — look how hard it’s trying not to be noticed!
Let’s be clear, though: It’s not the aesthetic of the combover that’s appealing. Whether it’s the toupee-like tuft, or the cartoonish strands stretched and layered just so, combovers can only look bad, or worse. No, the combover deserves celebration not for its rarefied ugliness but for the insight it gives us into the wearer: You actually thought that was a good look?
Like performance anxiety or Scarlett Johansson, hair loss hits men hard, leading even the most urbane to regrettable decisions. “I used to have this thing, this weird little line at the front of my head — a fringe, I called it,” recalls writer Jonathan Ames. “And I just happened to have no hair in the middle or at the top of the head. In wind it might suddenly fly forward. Or if I saw photos of it, it was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s just like a couple of strands.’ It was so dispiriting.”
Still, he persevered, even writing about — and diagramming! — his combover (which he calls a comb-back) in his book “What’s Not to Love?” and conducting a small study into who else sported the fringe. (“Matisse. James Baker, former Secretary of State. And I think Joseph Biden.”)
“I was somewhat deluded into thinking it looked more like a head of hair than it actually looked,” Ames says now. “I thought I was pulling it off. [But] people were like, ‘Why don’t you cut that down?’” (He eventually did, though not without dismay. “I miss having options,” he says sadly.)
Hair offenders like Ames “use the defense mechanism of denial to completely not think about how silly it looks,” says Sandra Dawson, a therapist and radio show host in El Segundo, Calif., who specializes in self-esteem issues. “And rationalization can be used alongside it.”
And combover-ees don’t just think they’re fooling people, adds Sheldon S. Walker, a psychologist based in Calgary, “They think it looks really good.” (For the record, he’s not speaking from personal experience: “I have a full head of hair.”)
So having a combover goes hand in hand with massive denial and/or massive powers of (self-) persuasion. Is it any wonder so many politicians have them?
“They convince themselves it makes them look like they have sage wisdom,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a New York political consultant. Yet friends, family and business associates can all be paralyzed in the face of such extreme delusion. Just ask anyone on Broadway.
“Oh my god, that guy!” screams Jon Jordan, the hair and makeup supervisor of “Hairspray.” That guy — Rick Lyon — is a distinguished puppeteer who developed the characters for “Avenue Q,” the Tony-winning musical. He originated several of the roles. He sings. He dances. He does it well. And he does it while wearing one of the most vicious combovers I’ve ever seen. It even overwhelms the puppets.
Jordan hasn’t even seen the show, but he knows all about Lyon and his massive comb-pas. “It’s legendary,” he says. “It’s epic. If I worked there, and had been the hairdresser, I would eventually talk to him about it.” (In his salon days, Jordan says he was the only one with the guts to confront an assistant who sported a combover. Eventually, the guy caved and shaved.)
But until then, Lyon, who declined to comment for this article, remains a prime example of a peculiar truth about combovers: The men who love them often happen to be quite powerful. (According to Zdatny, hair is a class signifier.) How else to explain the fact that no one — not Lyon’s fellow puppeteers, say, or Trump’s apprentices, or Caeser’s minions — had the courage to say, “Hey, boss, what’s with the hair?”
Unless — is it possible that some people actually find the combover attractive? Not according to a poll in this month’s issue of the men’s magazine Cargo, which found that 99 percent of women surveyed were against the look.
“I have never met one woman — spouse, daughter, mother — who said, ‘I think the combover is the way to go,’” says Chris Marino, 39, the long-haired, long-obsessed filmmaker whose “Combover: The Movie,” a documentary about his nationwide search to uncover the perfect specimen, is about to hit the film festival circuit. “Invariably, they all say, ‘Shave it off.’”
And sometimes they’re successful. When his then-fiancie Judith Nathan convinced Rudy Giuliani to give up his much-mocked splayed locks for a chrome dome, it made national headlines and proved that occasionally, there is someone who can break the combover spell (and, apparently, it isn’t Donna Hanover). But having that kind of sway is still a rarity, because as Marino discovered, pretending to have a full head of hair is only superficially about attracting women.
“Men do it for men,” he maintains.
Like arm wrestling and binge drinking, the male impulse to measure up to their brothers isn’t exactly the sign of a well-developed psyche.
“You’re really talking about an emotionally immature man,” says Dawson, the therapist. And since hair is associated with virility (“If there ever truly was a cure for baldness, it would make Viagra look like peanuts,” Walker says), when men grow their hair into a bi-level ’80s do and wrap it around their skull like some kind of talismanic protector, they actually want it to be some kind of talismanic protector. “It’s just one more sign of the dance to the music of time that we all engage in, that ends in death,” sighs Ames. Having a combover isn’t a fashion statement; it’s a cry for help.
And it’s one we don’t want to hear. According to his friend Bruce Vilanch, Nathan Lane was so mortified by the combover he had to wear during the filming of the movie version of “The Producers” that he didn’t go out for two months — and he had his head buzzed as soon as production wrapped.
Even our politicians are moving away from the look and its retrograde image. “People find them kind of a throwback to old-style politics, to people hiding something, and when you get rid of the combover, you kind of look clean and clear,” says Sheinkopf. “It’s OK to be bald. In the politics of the 21st century, it’s OK to be who you are.”
Maybe. But if we lose the combover, we lose all the secrets it reveals, from self-esteem to social status to fear of death. In the quest to get into the heart and mind of the Other, the combover provides answers that Foucault (who, incidentally, shaved his off) never could.
FILE - In this Feb. 2, 2012 file photo, Donald Trump greets Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during a news conference in Las Vegas. Romney is set to clinch the Republican nomination for president Tuesday with a win in the Texas primary, a feat of endurance for a candidate who came up short four years ago and watched this year as voters flirted with a carousel of front-runners before eventually warming to him. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File)(Credit: AP)
- Mitt Romney may just win this thing: Surprising no one, the candidate officially captured the last of the 1,144 delegates he needs to secure the GOP nomination last night in Texas, despite months of punditry about the possibility that the race could go all the way to the GOP convention.
But maybe Romney shouldn’t even bother. As Reuters reports astrologists foresee that Obama will be reelected. Still, it may not easy: “The ingress of Saturn into Scorpio may trouble him,” one said. “It won’t cost him the election, but it may indicate difficulties in the first half of his second term.”
- In case there was any doubt that Romney’s embrace of Donald Trump was a nod to birthers: The candidate released his birth certificate just minutes before a joint appearance with the reality TV star in Las Vegas last night. “Birther queen” Orly Taitz will be pleased, as she told me yesterday that Romney should disclose the document.
Most pundits assume Trump, acting as Romney surrogate and fundraiser, is “off message,” but the timing of the birth certificate release seems to add further evidence to the alertnate theory that the candidate is quietly trying to appeal to Republican voters still not convinced that Obama was born in the United States, without having to actually say a word about Obama’s birth certificate himself. Why else unexpectedly release the document last night when no one had been demanding to see it?
Still, budding Romney birthers may point out that it’s not actually a birth certificate but a “certificate of live birth.” Someone call Sheriff Joe Arpaio!
- Donald Trump went on his third televised birther rant in 24 hours last night: After taking his message to CNBC in the morning and CNN in the afternoon, he stopped by Fox News to tell host Greta Van Susteren that he wants “good solid proof” that Obama was born in the U.S. Asked what kind of proof might satisfy him, Trump replied, “let’s get back to jobs.” And while many speculate the Obama campaign is liking all this birther talk, Trump insisted, “I actually semi-know for a fact that they hate this subject.” At least “semi-know” is closer to a fact than Trump usually gets.
But the Christian Science Monitor’s Liz Marlantes argues the focus on Trump has obscured the “most important meeting” Romney had in Vegas yesterday — with casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who single-handedly kept Newt Gingrich’s campaign afloat for several months in the GOP primary and could send big money to Romney’s way.
That total includes previously undisclosed plans for newly aggressive spending by the Koch brothers, who are steering funding to build sophisticated, county-by-county operations in key states. POLITICO has learned that Koch-related organizations plan to spend about $400 million ahead of the 2012 elections – twice what they had been expected to commit.
Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Romney, plans to spend another $100 million, while Rove’s American Crossroads and it’s dark money sister group Crossroads GPS will spend a combined $300 billion. Thank you Citizens United.
- What would Mitt Romney’s foreign policy look like? Foreign Policy magazine’s Daniel Drezner sketches out the first year of a Romney administration if the candidate “had to implement every foreign policy campaign promise he’s ever made in every foreign-policy white paper, op-ed, campaign statement, or random utterance that came from his campaign.”
- Mitt Romney loves “A-M-E-R-C-I-A”: The Romney campaign rolled out a nifty little iPhone app last night with one big embarrassing glitch: It doesn’t know how to spell America. “Here’s how the free app works: You take a photo, then are able to lay one of 14 ‘I’m With Mitt’ banners over the image…The problem? One of the 14 options reads, in fact, ‘A Better Amercia.’ Yes, Amercia,” Mashable reports.
- Tea Party victory in Texas: Tea Party-favorite Ted Cruz was able to force a runoff in last night’s Texas GOP Senate primary against lieutenant governor David Dewhurst. Experts who spoke with Salon think the July runoff will favor Cruz, who has more dedicated supporters willing to go to the polls on a hot Texas summer day when turnout will likely be extremely low.
The Tea Party movement isn’t about purging moderates; that happened a long time ago. It’s about forcing the entire GOP to embrace a partisan warfare style of governance. When it comes to the Senate and House, that means electing candidates who will shun compromise with Democrats and exploit every possible legislative tool to advance their own agenda and stall the other party’s. It is about absolutism.
- Dirty tricks in Wisconsin recall: Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s (D) gubernatorial campaign was inundated with calls that clogged phone lines and caused headaches yesterday after a mysterious text message went out to thousands of Wisconsinites calling Barrett a “union puppet” and urging people to call his office. The campaign blamed allies of Republican Governor Scott Walker, whom Barrett will face in a recall election next week.
“That was a big steaming plate of shit spaghetti Trump just deposited on CNN for his supposed friend Romney,” apostate Republican David Frum wrote on Twitter Tuesday afternoon. I couldn’t say it any better.
On the day he’s hosting a supposed $2 million fundraiser for Mitt Romney in Las Vegas, Donald Trump doubled down – wait, is it tripled down? – on his birther nonsense in a hilarious interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. The normally deferential Blitzer wound up telling Trump: “Donald, Donald, you’re beginning to look a little ridiculous.”
Obviously Blitzer could have cut “beginning to look a little” from his put-down, but those were harsh words coming from Blitzer. Trump had already insulted the CNN anchor’s ratings, telling him, “Frankly, if you would report [the birther conspiracy] accurately, I think you would probably get better ratings than you’re getting, which are pretty small.”
So Obama surrogates Hilary Rosen and Cory Booker were almost universally denounced for ill-chosen words on behalf of the president, but Trump gets to insult not just Obama but an influential cable news anchor on behalf of Romney with no reprisals? That’s the old IOKIYAR double standard at work, but this time, it might actually backfire and hurt Romney.
For his part, Romney refused to either cut ties with Trump or denounce him. And his refusal to do so was a craven exercise in electoral groveling. “You know,” he told reporters Monday night, “I don’t agree with all the people who support me, and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in. But I need to get 50.1 percent or more, and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.” What else will Romney do to get to 50.1 percent? Stay tuned.
Of course, that’s not the first time Romney has refused to denounce or distance himself from a Republican supporter. When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” he merely said it was “not the language I would have used.” When Ted Nugent said “if Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” Romney simply asked for more civility in politics. When a supporter said Obama should be “tried for treason,” Romney didn’t challenge her at all and later told reporters: “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me. Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.” Romney keeps getting served big fat pitches to let him take a swing at a defining moment of political courage, pitches that he could knock out of the park. He just watches them float by.
Maybe Romney thinks he needs the birther loons to get elected. The base isn’t crazy about him. And Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reveals that Orly Taitz and Joseph Farah are thrilled that Trump continues to advance their cause. But this can’t end well. For better or worse, independents are likely to decide this election, and birther nonsense isn’t going to win them over.
I’ve probably reached my own personal low when I’m fact checking Trump’s lies, but today he consistently claimed – referencing a Breitbart.com story – that Obama’s “publisher” wrote that he was born in Kenya; in fact, the dubious story makes clear it was his literary agent, in a publicity brochure about her clients. (A former agency assistant quickly took the blame for the mistake and said the information didn’t come from Obama.)
Also, when talking about the agent’s brochure to the Daily Beast, Trump said it was a mistake made by a young man who “didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth.” But when dismissing Blitzer’s reference to the Honolulu Star Bulletin’s Barack Obama birth announcement just days after he was born, Trump argues “many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefit of being so-called born in this country.” So his parents knew enough to fake a birth announcement, but the young Harvard Law Review president threw all their hard work away to sell a book? Uh oh, I’m trying to find consistency in a Donald Trump argument. Time to close. Romney owns everything Trump says, and it will cost him in November.
The Breitbart.com empire must be proud Trump is using their story as “proof” of his birther nonsense. Even as they printed the allegation, they stressed that Breitbart himself didn’t support birtherism, and they insisted that they only published the story about the agent’s brochure just to prove the media didn’t vet Obama. Let’s get this straight: So they’re chiding the media for not publishing something that they themselves believe to be false. That’s awesome journalism.
In related news: Regarding the revival of Trump birtherism, I said Friday on “Hardball” that Breitbart’s journalistic proteges were “bottom feeders,” and one of them quickly proved it. I appreciate all the support I got on Twitter, but to me it was a dog bites man story, and utterly predictable. (I apologize to dogs everywhere for that unfair comparison.)
I talked about how Trump hurts Romney on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” Tuesday afternoon:
Mitt Romney walks past Donald Trump's airplane as he arrives in Las Vegas on Tuesday. (Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer)
There are many theories about why Mitt Romney is embracing Donald Trump, especially after Trump reaffirmed his conviction to CNN this afternoon that President Obama was not born in the United States. But what do the real birthers think of the sudden, renewed attention? We spoke to some of the theory’s top advocates to find out.
Orly Taitz, the dentist cum lawyer cum California Senate candidate who has filed numerous colorful lawsuits challenging Obama’s birth certificate, is thrilled. “Romney is correct, this is long overdue,” Taitz told Salon. “I do believe that the Romney campaign is sending a message that they are questioning Obama’s eligibility.”
Joseph Farah, the publisher of the conservative news outfit WorldNetDaily, which devotes the vast majority of its time to advancing new grist for the birth certificate mill, agrees. Farah sees the campaign’s use of Trump as a subtle way to appease what he sees as a surprisingly large voting bloc who still have doubts about Obama’s birth, all without making the candidate actually say it himself.
“Trump, whether he’s out there publicly talking about eligibility or not during the campaign, because of what he’s previously said and done on the subject, has already won the hearts and minds of people out there who are suspicious about this, so they associate Trump with suspicions about Obama’s story,” Farah told Salon.
“So that will help Romney solidify a base that he desperately needs to carry overwhelmingly, and Romney doesn’t need to say anything,” he said. In a sense, they’re “doing each others’ bidding” — Romney gets to associate with the issue while Trump gets to be Trump.
Farah said as many as 50 percent of Americans have doubts about Obama’s story, while Taitz pointed to a dubious online poll which found that 99 percent of Tea Party supporters do not believe that Obama was born in Hawaii.
Though a recent YouGov poll found the number of doubters to be about 25 percent, Farah may have a point about Romney’s need to appeal to skeptical arch-conservatives who really hate Obama. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) strongly repudiated the birthers in 2008, but as Trump himself tweeted today, “@BarackObama is practically begging @MittRomney to disavow the place of birth movement, he is afraid of it and for good reason. He keeps using @SenJohnMcCain as an example, however, @SenJohnMcCain lost the election. Don’t let it happen again.”
Still, Trump may not be an ideal advocate for the cause, Farah acknowledged, saying his characteristically flamboyant and self-centered approach to pursuing the issue is not always the most informed. “Does Donald Trump know all that stuff? I don’t know,” he said.
Though neither said they’ve been contacted by the Romney campaign, Taitz said she has been invited to two Romney fundraisers by their hosts, including one who was a Bush-era ambassador to Spain.
Meanwhile, Taitz called on Romney to release his birth certificate as well (he has not, so far), and she has said both vice presidential candidates should, too. “We have to be consistent,” she explained.
One thing when writing about the Republican Party and the crazy – you can always be certain that it’ll generate new examples. So just when the news that a member of the House accused dozens of Democrats in Congress of being Communists seemed to be going stale, along comes Donald Trump – who is scheduled to appear at a fundraiser with Mitt Romney next week – to spout birther nonsense.
For those of us who believe that there’s something seriously wrong with the Republican Party (and see Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s new book; see also my argument that the problem is not about how “conservative” they are, but about their radical style), the big question is whether anything can be done about it. American democracy needs two strong, solid political parties, but currently one of the parties is just a mess – incapable of making coherent policy when it’s in office, and dangerously obstructionist when it’s out of office.
So how can a party recover? I think there are three ways, but two are unfortunately quite unlikely, and the third is at best uncertain.
Some talk about the possibility that the electorate will punish Republicans for their radicalism. Unfortunately, I think that’s unlikely. Note that consecutive blowouts in 2006 and 2008 certainly didn’t make things better. Part of the problem here, too, is that elections generally don’t work that way. It’s true that the impression of ideological extremism can be costly, as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern learned the hard way, but we’re talking here about 2 or 3 percentage points in a presidential election. Direct action by the voters just isn’t enough to do it. After all, as voters, they can only choose between the nominees that they’ve been offered, and if anything voters are more partisan than ever; they’re not likely to defect just because a candidate embraces the crazy, even if they don’t like it, because they would still have a strong preference for that candidate otherwise.
A second possibility is that they’ll wind up with a successful president who sets a strong example of sane conservativism and who is strong enough within the party that he or she can push a lot of the crazies to the fringes and beyond. That could work. Presidents have limited influence in general, but one thing that a popular president can do is to define normality for his or her own party. They can reward some and punish — or at least avoid rewarding — others, creating real and meaningful incentives that can be very different from what came before. The obvious analogy is Dwight Eisenhower’s maneuverings against Joe McCarthy. The problem is that for this strategy to work it takes a skilled and popular president who decides to try it, but Republicans might have to wait a long time before they get another Ike.
So the first method probably can’t work, and the second one is unlikely to happen. That leaves one other possibility: that the Republican coalition itself might demand change. Specifically, that Republican-aligned interest groups – perhaps business, national security or others – might become upset enough with the crazy, or worried enough that the crazy will impede their ability to get things done, that they’ll push to end it. After all, part of the problem with the crazy is that it truly is random; you really never know what nonsense Limbaugh or the Breitbart sites are going to be up to next, and there’s every possibility that it could interfere with groups within the party pursuing their interests. Even worse: Politicians who believe they were elected because their most valuable allies convinced the electorate that the president was a radicalized foreigner are going to be responsive to those supporters, and not to organized party groups. Those groups have enough troubles as it is, since in the current free-for-all campaign finance environment they have to compete with random billionaires who might have all sorts of unorthodox policy preferences.
We’ve seen a little bit of this already. During the healthcare debate, many normally Republican-leaning groups chose to work with the Obama administration and cut their best deal, rather than sticking with the rejectionist GOP. Several companies quit the conservative state lobbying organization ALEC when it became controversial by lobbying for ideological and partisan goals. On the national security side, a break has emerged between the Department of Defense and movement conservatives; both conservatives who care about national security and (on some issues) businesses might choose to stick with the Pentagon. And it’s not quite the same thing, but there’s been a small but steady stream of defectors from the movement.
Nevertheless, something like this would likely play out in nomination politics, with party-aligned groups insisting on candidates who are willing to fight for their interests while rejecting the crazy, and there certainly isn’t any sign of that yet. Will it in 2014 and 2016 if Romney falls short this fall and the crazy gets even worse? I have no idea – but that’s the only path out of this that I can imagine.
Despite the fact that Donald Trump reaffirmed today that he’s pretty sure President Obama “was born in Kenya,” Mitt Romney advisor Kevin Madden defended an upcoming joint fundraiser in Las Vegas today, arguing that Romney shouldn’t be held responsible for Trump’s birtherism.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Madden noted that Romney has publicly repudiated the birther myth in the past, and would do it again, but stopped short of saying that the candidate will do it in Trump’s presence.
When Mitchell asked if Romney will “stand up next to Donald Trump and disavow that [myth],” Madden replied, “He’ll stand up next to Donald Trump and he’ll talk about why he wants to be president.” “Any time the subject goes off of that, or if something where … Governor Romney would disagree, he’s going to make that very clear,” Madden added, without saying whether that clarification would be to Trump’s face or after the event.
The twice-bankrupt casino mogul has managed to insinuate himself into the Romney campaign, even as he continues to push the entirely false and racially tinged birther myth. If Trump has his way, he’ll play an even bigger role in the Romney campaign going forward, potentially speaking at the GOP convention or even snagging the vice-presidential nod, for which he nominated himself this week.
The standard the Romney campaign seems to be advancing here is that it’s OK for the candidate to appear on the same stage as a loon, as long as that loon doesn’t say the thing that makes him loony in the candidate’s presence. And if he does, the candidate can merely disavow it later. But it’s hard to imagine that the right would be comfortable with Obama appearing on the same stage as, say, Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright, even if neither said anything controversial in that moment.
So having a combover goes hand in hand with massive denial and/or massive powers of (self-) persuasion. Is it any wonder so many politicians have them? 
FILE - In this Feb. 2, 2012 file photo, Donald Trump greets Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during a news conference in Las Vegas. Romney is set to clinch the Republican nomination for president Tuesday with a win in the Texas primary, a feat of endurance for a candidate who came up short four years ago and watched this year as voters flirted with a carousel of front-runners before eventually warming to him. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File)(Credit: AP) 
Mitt Romney and Donald Trump (Credit: AP) 
Mitt Romney walks past Donald Trump's airplane as he arrives in Las Vegas on Tuesday. (Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer) 
Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/David Moir) 
