Ain't Half The Man, But . . .
Nov. 2nd, 2008 02:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaSo Dubya has been lying low. I guess the RNC asked him to stay out of the spotlight until the election was over - didn't want McCain to get tarnished by Dubya's approval ratings. Cheney apparently came out of his undisclosed location long enough to re-iterate his support for McCain. I seriously doubt that will be a net plus for him, either.
One of the things that the Presidency does to the men who hold it is age them. Obviously, they were going to age four or eight years in that timespan, anyway. But the office makes them old before their time. Reagan worked very hard to disguide this, with hair dye and makeup, but he couldn't hide the toll it took on his mind. Carter, Bush the Greater, and (especially) Clinton just wore it. Watching Clinton age over his eight years was a little shocking, honestly. Gore has aged gracefully over the past eight years - I wonder what he'd look like now if it had been him in the Oval Office.
Anyway, when I saw this picture of Bush the Lesser, I noticed how much he's aged - he's gone pretty much completely grey, and unlike Reagan hasn't bothered to cover it up - but what really struck me is that he's starting to look like his dad. If you look at the political cartoonists' caricatures of him and his father, they look nothing alike - his are Ernie-style, horizontal, while his father's are all vertical lines and chin. And there are good reasons for that; they really don't look that much alike. But in that photo, he has his father's facial lines, and the deep bone structure starting to show against the roundness of his facial flesh.
It took the hardest job in the world to bring out the family resemblance. That's actually kind of sad.
One of the things that the Presidency does to the men who hold it is age them. Obviously, they were going to age four or eight years in that timespan, anyway. But the office makes them old before their time. Reagan worked very hard to disguide this, with hair dye and makeup, but he couldn't hide the toll it took on his mind. Carter, Bush the Greater, and (especially) Clinton just wore it. Watching Clinton age over his eight years was a little shocking, honestly. Gore has aged gracefully over the past eight years - I wonder what he'd look like now if it had been him in the Oval Office.
Anyway, when I saw this picture of Bush the Lesser, I noticed how much he's aged - he's gone pretty much completely grey, and unlike Reagan hasn't bothered to cover it up - but what really struck me is that he's starting to look like his dad. If you look at the political cartoonists' caricatures of him and his father, they look nothing alike - his are Ernie-style, horizontal, while his father's are all vertical lines and chin. And there are good reasons for that; they really don't look that much alike. But in that photo, he has his father's facial lines, and the deep bone structure starting to show against the roundness of his facial flesh.
It took the hardest job in the world to bring out the family resemblance. That's actually kind of sad.
