Screw Botox Rumors, This is Reality

Browsing Reddit's top stories, I came across this one from CNN, where they talk about how crowds at a recent Clinton campaign speech didn't like her poking at some of the things ol' Barry said. Yeah yeah, people of all political affiliations love Obama--the man is awesome, and its hard for the public to accept attacks on his good nature when he is indeed so honestly good-natured. But that's not what I noticed about the article; my attention was drawn to the image. My, Hillary is looking tired. Let's compare, shall we?

The picture from CNN made me really want to do a side-by-side comparison of Hillary before the campaign announcement and now, so I did some searching and came up with a few images. This first image(¹) is given a date of November 8, 2006. I feel it's a pretty good judge of what Hillary looked like pre-democratic nomination race, and you can tell that she's not been Photoshopped. How? Well, click the image and view it full size. There are two men on either side of Hillary (probably security detail), one just behind her head on the left and the other at the right edge of the image. Look at their eyes; that's a pretty bad red-eye reduction, isn't it? Not only do they have oddly square pupils that go beyond their eyelids, but they have no irises. Also, note the zombie man just behind right security guard; if I was good enough at PhotoShop to youthen' up Hillary, I'd be good (and smart) enough to remove his undead ass. Anyway, Hillary looked good, pretty much what a woman her age should look like.

Now, for the second photo I'd like to point you to this one in the Clinton campaign's Flickr stream (and don't forget to check the one in the aforementioned CNN story). I'd post the image here, but it is published under an "All Rights Reserved" copyright, so I can't legally reproduce it here. It's a very good image to compare to the one above because she is smiling very similarly. But you can see it too, can't you? She's looking tired. Haggard even, especially around the eyes. To be fair, the campaign trail is hard, never mind that she's still merely campaigning to be elected as the Democratic candidate. And yaknow, being shot at non-stop by snipers while you're in a plane stresses the body in ways that surely take their toll over time. Right.

Now--I can't resist--let's compare some photos of Obama. Ready? The first image(²) is dated October 8, 2006 (a month prior to the "before" of Hillary). To find it I went to the Obama campaign's Flickr stream, but oh, guess what? I can legally post it here, because all the images in that stream are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license. This is to be considered our "base image" for what Barack Obama looks like before the rigors of campaigning for the Democratic nomination.

Next let's look at something recent; the image at right(³) is dated January 26, 2007, and I'd say it is reasonable to assume the fellow's not changed much in the four months since. In fact, he looks much the same as he did in 2006; I at least cannot find any noteworthy differences. Although in the 2006 picture he does look like he has a little silver in his hair, but that could just be the lighting.

Now, you're probably wondering why I've gone to all the trouble to find and compare these images of these two Presidential potentials. The reason is this: Being the President of the United States of America is a really fucking hard job. And with the current state of our country, making progress in the next four years is going to require a lot of work. I've always thought presidents were underpaid for the work, though I guess if you made it a high-grossing salary it'd be closer to an empire than a democracy (I guess that's why most modern presidents have learned to be sneaky with the way they earn money...)

Anyway, when you have a stressful job managing a business, it shows. Doesn't matter how many people are under your employment; you could be the manager of a software startup that employs less than 30 people, or you could be a politician who helps makes decisions that will govern the lives of millions of people. Either way, you're going to be fucking stressed. And it will show, with every month and every year you work that difficult job. I said before that the campaign trail was hard, but obviously, the post-win years will be even harder. If you can't make it through the pre-election months without looking like you've aged 5 or 10 years, I can't imagine you'll feel very good after four years in the Oval Office.

In case you think I'm being superficial by analyzing how these two people's faces have aged in the past two years, please understand. I don't care. I don't think I'm being superficial in the least. The body is a machine and when things start breaking down on the inside, there will be signs of it on the outside. I'm not calling Hillary a "broken machine"; I'm merely pointing out one of the most obvious risks to working a stressful job: it's hard on your health. And one of the easiest, time-honored ways to gauge a person's health and resilience is by analyzing their physical appearance.

Additionally, it's been heavily rumored that Hillary has used Botox to regain some of her youthful appearance, and can you blame her? She's up against someone 14 years her junior who will be one of the youngest presidents in history if he wins. But the difference between Hillary using Botox to look younger and a Hollywood actress doing the same is that an actress' entire livelihood is based on her maintaining an attractive, desirable physical appearance, whereas politicians are required to make difficult decisions and represent The People--an ability that (as far as I know) does not change with their appearance.

So what if Obama is maybe using hair dye for men to cover a bit of silver? I'm much more comfortable with a politician (male or female) dying their hair than I am with their using Botox. The latter just seems far more deceptive. If Hillary is 60 years old now, and appears to age 5 years in less than half the time, what will it be like when she's at the end of her first term--which would logically be more stressful than two years of campaigning--and looks like she's in her mid- to late-seventies? The presidential campaign is as much about health and longevity as it is about ideals and experience, because it would really suck if our next president up and had a stress-induced heart attack in the middle of his/her term. I'm not going to judge or vote for a candidate based purely on the "attractiveness" of their appearance, but I will certainly take my time to consider each, and use my own mind to contemplate less-discussed aspects of the candidate and the job, and how the two will work together.

¹ - via WikiMedia Commons
² - via Flickr
³ - via WikiMedia Commons