Serious commentators are right to balk at the notion of judging candidates by their appearance. It diverts attention from the candidate’s ideas and policies, the stuff that actually matters. But hair is sometimes more than a matter of dumb fashion, as the sociologist Anthony Synnott writes: “The debate over hair symbolism is both ancient and complex, and applies not only to gender but also to politics.”

So now that it’s one of the criteria for selecting a candidate to run for president of the United States, it’s time we discussed hair, and the lack of it on our politicians’ heads.

There are plenty of minorities still woefully under-represented in politics, but none more so than men who choose to wear their hair long or funky. The fact that men with follicular abundance don’t have anyone to represent them in government, or even reading the news on TV, is hardly a civil rights issue. But like gay men often have before them, intelligent men who wish to wear a long or funky hairstyle sometimes have to sacrifice an important part of their identity to be taken seriously in establishment circles.

Hair style and dress sense are the only issues where politicians present a narrower range of options for voters than policies. Their political conservatism is reflected, and possibly shaped by, their follicular safeness. If you like, you can research this yourself. But you will find, after inspecting candidates’ heads at the local, state and federal level, there are very few afros, perms, ducktails, beehives, streaks, mop-tops, hi-top fades, curtains, asymmetrical fringes, Mohicans, pony-tails, dreadlocks, cornrows, Jheri curls, devilocks, liberty spikes, rat tails, bowl-cuts, under-cuts or mullets.

If you are one of the thousands or millions of men with one of these things on your head, voting can be a lonely and frustrating process.

Today’s politicians don’t actually have a thing against long hair per se, since a lot of them are deserters from the long-haired community. Look at old pictures of Barack Obama with an afro, Bill Clinton’s shaggy mop and Tony Blair in his Mick Jagger phase. But they visited the barber before they ran for office because politics is an annex of the banking, legal, military and other notoriously short-haired professions.

The political establishment and its associated industries simply use a candidate’s appearance as a means of weeding out people who don’t act in their interests. So we end up with phrases like “presidential hair,” which means, on a more subtextual level, that the man underneath it won’t be out of place pressing flesh at a Wall Street dinner or engaging in bonhomie with military personnel. In short, these industries want to make sure the candidate is one of their guys, and in their antiquated world of alpha masculinity, something approaching a buzz cut is essential. Considering their election campaigns — especially the fundraising part — are essentially a series of job interviews with a panel of generals, bankers and super-rich lawyers, it’s not surprising that candidates scissor themselves as soon as their name gets near a ballot paper.

Of course, upper-class American hair culture is based on a misconception: that long hair is an indicator of liberalism, radicalism and bad personal hygiene, mostly because of its association with various subcultures like the hippies and punks. And that’s the reason you don’t see many GOP candidates with brightly colored wood-glued Mohicans. Those guys are the enemy — unpatriotic, anarchists, socialists. But even the supposed liberals and radicals in politics play it safe, probably because they’re scared of being called out as a stoned slacker by Bill O’Reilly. So if you line the likes of Dennis Kucinich and (to a slightly lesser extent) Bernie Sanders up against the far-right conservatives, it looks like they all went to the same barber.

This saddens me. But long-haired liberals aren’t the only ones who should be interested in fighting against the homogeneity of mainstream hair culture, because it’s also possible to be a misguided right-wing zealot with any hair style whatsoever. Ask Johnny Ramone, a lifelong conservative who thanked George W. Bush for his presidency when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Just as his politics never mellowed, neither did his hair. And to think that it wasn’t his ludicrous perspective on the world that kept Johnny Ramone from being a presidential contender, but his leather jacket and heroin mullet — Republicans today, who have to choose between Romney and a bunch of identical crackpots in suits, must be furious. Forget Ron Paul — Johnny Ramone would have been the real anti-Washington candidate.

One annoyance for long-hairs is that when we do see a variation from the comb over or baldness on a politician nowadays — and it’s only ever a slight variation — it tends to indicate that the guy wearing it has done something seriously unethical while in office. The guy with the most flamboyant bouffant seen in some time, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, is serving 14 years in jail for corruption. In my native U.K., the politicians with the longest hair, London mayor Boris Johnson and Mike Hancock (a member of Parliament), are both serial adulterers. But the few slightly long-haired politicians out there are no less trustworthy than your average hair-off-the-collar public official, who will, on average, embezzle and screw around just as much as Blagojevich, Hancock and Johnson. The combined hair lengths of regular trimmers like Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond and Newt Gingrich — embezzlers, love rats and hypocrites of an epic scale — is enough to dismiss the argument that only long hair indicates an unsuitability for serving one’s country.

The idea that voters won’t go for a long-haired candidate is untested and in all likelihood false. The electorate certainly wouldn’t disapprove of a long-haired legislature any more than it does of the current bunch of knuckle-heads. It would be almost impossible, unless we came up with a way of calculating negative approval ratings. Public support for Congress couldn’t get much lower, even if Rasputin was installed as speaker of the House. As Mike Huckabee puts it: Congress is polling “just barely above a pedophile.”

Since 2008, a key source of disapproval has become politicians’ links to big business and their support for foreign wars. Even Newt Gingrich has jumped on the anti-Wall Street bandwagon to attack Mitt Romney’s past as a vulture capitalist. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are throwing themselves away from Wall Street (publicly at least) like it’s an exploding bomb. Yet, one of the reasons people don’t believe guys like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or Barack Obama when they say they’re not stooges for Wall Street or the military industrial complex (besides the fact that we all know they are) is because they look so at home there. Their thousand-dollar suits and bi-weekly visits to the barber mean voters don’t have to have such wild imaginations to envisage any of the contenders for president buddying up with Stanley McChrystal and Lloyd Blankfein in an after-hours poker game — gambling away the country’s economy in unnecessary military spending, corporate tax breaks and bank bailouts.

If political candidates — Democrat or Republican — want to distance themselves from these industries, they could start by ditching the uniform. Turning up to a fundraiser with a Roddy Piper-style perma-mullet would erase the conundrum of having to take all that Wall Street cash, since there won’t be as much of it on offer.

BLITZER’S BLOG: It’s going to get nasty!

By Wolf Blitzer, CNN
(CNN) – If you think it’s been a rough ride for the Republican candidates during this current campaign season, just wait. This will be seen as child’s play once the general election campaign begins.

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: the war of words between President Obama and his campaign supporters versus the eventual Republican nominee and his supporters will be fierce.

Even though there has already been a lot of talking and stuff happening during this political campaign, you won’t believe how much additional talking and arguing there will be as it continues. I have said in the past that Barack Obama and the person running against him will say things at and about each other, and I am saying it again. Things will be said.

If you think Wolf Blitzer’s blog post about the intensity of this campaign is finished, just wait. He quotes three lines from last night’s debate, then writes four more one-sentence paragraphs:

And that’s just for starters. Just wait for what’s coming.

By the way, the president and his supporters will not be shy in fighting back.

And like the Republicans, they will have hundreds of millions of dollars to finance attack ads.

Get ready for a brutal political season.

I am, Wolf! I am!

THIS JUST IN TO THE SITUATION ROOM: Every other political blogger has retired from political blogging to curate Pinterests about sandwiches instead, because Wolf Blitzer just made our jobs redundant.

The only remaining question is whether Wolf Blitzer is a better blogger than his Fox counterpoint in incisive online commentary, Greta Van Susteren. As long as CNN insists on “copy editing” Blitzer, we may never know for sure.

This is wrong. Flip-flopping is not a vice but a virtue. It embodies the very genius of the American political system. It helps explain how America could evolve from a backwater colony to a global superpower and why it is highly unlikely that a successful third party will emerge.

To see why too much principle makes bad politics we must look at a principle of physics – yes, physics. Called the constructal law, it holds that all design in nature – picture the tree-like shape of river basins, lightning bolts and our circulatory system – emerges to facilitate the flow of currents (in these examples of water, electricity and blood).

Politics is also a flow system with multiple currents, including ideas, infrastructure, money and supporters. As river basins move water through a network of rivulets, brooks, streams and rivers like the Mississippi, political currents flow through actual channels.  Politics, after all, is another name for the movement of ideas and other currents from here to there. All require paths to move. All must overcome various forms of resistance that dot the landscape, whether it’s hard ground or opposing parties.

National politics, then, is a tapestry of flows that sweep the land, leading to and coming from a decision-making point, in Washington, D.C. Just like the Mississippi River basin, the political flow has a tree-shaped configuration: The country is the tree canopy, and the trunk is rooted in the capital.

This explains why it is so hard for third parties to take root. Channels need time, work and resources to form. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was the Nile. Over time, these channels become entrenched, as they improve their capacity to move more current more easily.

The Democratic Party (founded in the 1790s) and the Republican Party (founded in 1854) have had a long time to generate good designs. Short of a cataclysmic event that reshapes the political landscape, such as the wrenching divide over slavery that gave birth to the Republicans, it is extremely difficult for upstarts to compete with these entrenched parties.

But this is only part of the story. Flip-flopping covers much of the rest. Or, to put it in physics term, the genius of our two-party system is its freedom to change. Just as river basins configure and reconfigure themselves to flow more easily, our major parties adapt to the evolving needs and desires of the American people.

No one would confuse the Democratic Party led by Thomas Jefferson, with its embrace of slavery and celebration of the yeoman farmer, with the party led by Barack Obama. Republicans extol Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt as iconic figures, but few of today’s GOP faithful would support their push for activist government.

The two parties have persisted because they have offered new ideas when the older ones no longer flowed.

Similarly, a key to Romney and Obama’s success is their ability to adapt their message to a changing electorate, without appearing to lack all integrity. Take healthcare, where both men are being accused of flip-flopping. In reality, they reconfigured their views to overcome resistance that threatened to block the flow of their ideas. Both men vowed to reform healthcare when they took office – Romney as governor of Massachusetts, Obama as president. Romney, as leader of one of the most progressive states in the country, offered a plan that he felt would improve the delivery of care and move through his legislature. (He’s also noted that many of the bills he signed and the judges he appointed reflected the state’s political realities.)

Obama, recognizing that he was no longer addressing Hyde Park liberals, ditched the single-payer concept he had long endorsed in favor of a plan that could overcome the resistance for a House filled with antagonistic Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats. This is why both men describe their plans as imperfect, and as the best they could have hoped to accomplish.

Romney, adapting to a different electorate as he runs for president, is reconfiguring his plan once more.

One could offer a similar analysis for most every politician on a host of issues. Practically speaking, those who accuse politicians of flip-flopping focus on the idea they want to flow but ignore the resistance it must overcome.Compromise and tradeoff are two other names for the process of finding ways to change the design to maintain flow when ideas encounter bottlenecks and resistance. This is the physics of politics. So the next time folks accuse your favorite candidate of flip-flopping, thank them for the compliment. The ability to change is a virtue.

Bosch actually mentions my recent piece on “the prudes of the GOP” by way of saying that, “clearly, Christie isn’t in that camp” — but I’m not so sure that prudery is at odds with a demeaning sex joke. In fact, I see it as an essential element of prudery, which casts sex as a dirty and shameful act (except under a very rigorously policed – and, quite frankly, rare — set of circumstances. I don’t know what Christie actually intended by his remark, but if it was to say, “Suck it, sweetheart,” I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised. It would be yet another prime example of right-wing conservatives viewing sex itself as a “gotcha.”

You wouldn’t want to play a drinking game pegged to the outright lies and distortions told at the event, hosted by Citizens United and Mike Huckabee, whose documentary “The Gift of Life” also premiered. It was attended by Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. (Mitt Romney and Ron Paul had other commitments.) It was the stuff of stomach-pumping. President Obama notoriously supported Kathleen Sebelius’ decision to overrule the FDA and keep Plan B away from most teenagers, but Bachmann made it sound like Obama wanted to give your tween daughter “the morning-after abortion” pill anyway. How’s that for compromise and reason? (Since it may need to be said again, emergency contraception doesn’t end a pregnancy. It prevents ovulation.) Nearly everyone made repeated references to federally funded abortions, which under the Hyde Amendment remain practically nonexistent. And Bachmann made her favorite baseless claim, that “repealing Obamacare” is a pro-life cause, despite the fact that the Affordable Care Act didn’t change the status quo on abortion coverage, much to pro-choicers’ disappointment.

Throughout the evening, it was clear that even though it feels like reproductive rights are under assault from every angle, anti-choicers still feel like they’re losing and that no one cares about them.

“Why is it that the pro-lifers are always told to stand against the wall?” asked Bachmann plaintively, assuring the audience that they wouldn’t have to wait their turn in a Bachmann administration. (They just might have to wait a very, very long time for a Bachmann administration.)

That sense of beleaguerment is Santorum’s specialty — it fuels resentment to have never experienced a bump in the polls. He mimicked the press asking him, “ ‘Are the social issues really as important? And isn’t just the economic issues? Oh, it’s just the economic issues.’ I always tell the press, has the vote yet been cast?” He insisted that abortion (and implicitly, homosexuality) “are not these unique set-aside issues.”

Then it got really motivational. “You may think we’re failures. We’re not. We’re not,” Santorum insisted.

It depends how you measure success. As I reported recently, the anti-choice movement has succeeded in passing lots of laws that make abortion odious, shaming and expensive, but they have no widespread public support for an outright ban of abortion, a handful of Iowa voters aside. Not only does the movement keep having its hand slapped by the federal courts, it’s split by a debate over how to push its legislative agenda in the first place. The incrementalists, however miserable they are making women’s lives, have a pretty strong argument that their way is best, even if they wouldn’t have gotten applause at the forum tonight.  A total ban in Mississippi, the Personhood amendment, that would also have gone after birth control and IVF, failed at the ballot box. Just today, the leader of the Ohio Senate suspended debate on the so-called Heartbeat Bill, which was trying to ban first-trimester abortions.

None of this is reason for pro-choicers to take a breather, but if anti-choicers feel like failures, it’s probably because the majority of the country doesn’t agree with them.