"Outward grace is dust" according to James Russell Lowell, but Mr. Lowell lied and said that the American people were therefore ready to discount outward grace:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/186509/lowell

The Atlantic Monthly | September 1865

Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865

by James Russell Lowell

VI.

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,
     Whom late the Nation he had led,
     With ashes on her head,
Wept with the passion of an angry grief:
Forgive me, if from present things I turn
To speak what in my heart will beat and burn,
And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn.
     Nature, they say, doth dote,
     And cannot make a man
     Save on some worn-out plan,
     Repeating us by rote:
For him her Old-World mould aside she threw,
   And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
      Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
      How beautiful to see
Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed,
Who loved his charge, but never loved to lead;
One whose meek flock the people joyed to be,
     Not lured by any cheat of birth,
     But by his clear-grained human worth,
And brave old wisdom of sincerity!
     They knew that outward grace is dust;
     They could not choose but trust
In that sure-footed mind's unfaltering skill . . .

This is bad poetry in several ways, and probably the worst way is the lie that people weren't "lured by any cheat of birth" (a pretty face).

Here are two photographs of Lincoln.

http://www.yale.edu/terc/democracy/may1text/images/Lincolnheads.jpg

On the left is a detail from a heavily retouched photograph that was distributed by Lincoln's campaign in 1860. On the right is a more honest image of Honest Abe. For decades after Lincoln's death, people were passing around the retouched photos and saying, "see, he wasn't as homely as his enemies said."

Maybe Lincoln would have been elected, anyway, if his campaign had been honest about his looks. Then again, maybe not.

The most famously handsome and empty headed president was Warren Harding. Harding was mostly lazy and unprincipled, and happily signed whatever the Republican congress wanted him to -- lowering taxes, raising tariffs, and restricting immigration. The only good thing about Harding was that, as a Republican, he was against the Dixiecrats and was therefore in a position to be against some of Woodrow Wilson's racist policies.

Romney could run as the "new and improved Harding, now with marital fidelity!"

Outward grace is dust, but it can still win elections.

http://j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000470.html

August 07, 2002

Kaus has thus passed through the third of the four stages of becoming a Rhinoceros... excuse me, a neoconservative.

The first stage is to hold that the flaws--the mighty flaws--of the center-left in American politics are important enough to more-or-less balance the flaws of the right. The second stage is to start making desperate and implausible excuses for Republican politicians and functionaries. The third stage is to lose contact with the substance of public policy issues, and focus instead on intellectual and rhetorical "errors" made by those left of center. And the fourth stage is to start acclaiming right-wing political hacks as noble thinkers, and right-wing office holders as bold and far-sighted leaders with a plan to guide us to utopia.

- - DeLong

Bucky Wan was a li'l baby, uh-huh,
Sittin' on his mama's knee, oh, yeah,
Said: "Farmer MacGregor should just napalm those bunnies;
Cause them cottontails are dissin' his property!
Lawd, Lawd. Got no respect for property.

Bucky Wan had a li'l woman,
Her name was Lucy Ann,
Bucky Wan took sick an' had to go to bed,
Lucy Ann torched bunnies like a man,
Lawd, Lawd, torched collectivists like a man.

http://sideshow.me.uk/sjun07.htm#06080230

Friday, 08 June 2007 . . . The problem of course, is that Bush has upheld the principles of the conservative movement, and all of these so-called conservatives who are suddenly so disappointed in him had been cheering him on all along while he did all these things they supposedly didn't like. And the thing is, they still haven't repudiated the actual policies - just the outcome . . .

. . . It's all very well to say in hindsight that Bush didn't run the war and occupation competently, that there should have been more troops at the outset, that we somehow should have warred harder or whatever it is they think would have been "competent", but what none of them are saying is that (a) you would have needed a draft to have enough troops to do it up right, (b) this would have been even more expensive, and (c) outsourcing to private firms was still too expensive.

They aren't complaining about the lack of a draft, and they have never complained about the Bush-Cheney program of giving Halliburton et al. far more money than it would have cost just to let the army do the same things . . .

http://sideshow.me.uk/sjun07.htm#06080230

in case anybody's looking for a place that might be on-topic.