Why yes, $30,000 does seem like a lot of money for a man to spend in a little more than a year having his hair cut. And make-up, don’t forget. Television makeup, one assumes. I hasten to add that we are free to festoon ourselves however we please, and I would never judge anyone. I have no idea what a tube of lipstick costs nowadays, but imagine it’s expensive.
So I am not criticizing Mayor Brandon Johnson because he spent $30,000 in campaign funds — $82 a day, every day, 365 days a year, quite a lot really — on trims and concealer. It shows. He’s always so ... soigne. So put together.
Honestly, when I first read my colleague Bob Herguth’s fine piece outlining the mayor’s greasepaint tab, my initial reaction was relief: At least he didn’t steal the money from taxpayers. So kudos there.
Then, concerned about possible hypocrisy, I started toting up the price of my own vanity. Visits to Great Clips cost $21, if there isn’t a coupon — and those have been harder to find lately — plus $5 tip for the stylist. With me going at least every other month, that’s ... urggg, doing the math ... about $156 a year. Plus razors. That’s gotta be another $2 a week. Add shampoo and we’re up to around $300 a year.
Or 1/100th of the mayor’s tab. I would never have waded into this topic were it not for what Johnson said when asked about the money his campaign spent to make him presentable.
“It’s always appropriate to make sure that we’re investing in small businesses. Especially minority-owned, Black-owned, women-owned businesses,” Johnson said after Wednesday’s City Council meeting, piling on more verbiage, never answering the question, his go-to move. “I encourage all of you in this room to support small business. Go get your hair and makeup done, by Black people in particular.”
Ignore the question while turning the topic into a racial issue — the usual Brandon Johnson playbook. I’m just glad he didn’t use his own family as human shields, again, as when discussing the migrant crisis.
Nor did Johnson run away, like in that clip of him fleeing Mary Ann Ahern, which I predict will be his undying image no matter what he spends on cosmetics. Honestly, Johnson could hire a private jet to fly Tom Ford in to thread his brows and the central image the city has of him will still be the mayor’s stylishly clad backside, vanishing into the distance.
Back when Rahm Emanuel was mayor, Esquire magazine hired me to write his profile. Meaning I had to focus on him more than I’d like. Eventually I was able to capture Emanuel’s essence in a single sentence:
“He cares so much about his image it makes him look bad.”
I thought that was clever, at the time, a distillation of Rahm’s relentless self-promotion, geysering self-serving facts, a frenetic little figurine of a man, waving himself in the public eye the way a child will waggle a doll, providing voice and motion to an object that is actually dead inside.
I have no insight into what’s going on inside Brandon Johnson’s expensively coifed head. My only personal experience with him is seeing him rush past me in City Hall. He seems overwhelmed. Though I’m holding out hope that being out to sea might yet prove an advantage. Look at Richard J. Daley. Famous for his hands-on management, his calculation, his iron grip on power. And how did that work? He manipulated the city right into the disaster of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In trying to avoid trouble, he multiplied it.
Perhaps Brandon Johnson will blunder his way to success. Yes, one expects his incompetence at just about everything will prove disastrous when called upon to cope with as enormous and fraught an enterprise as a national convention. You assume he’ll commit blunders far worse than Lori Lightfoot raising the bridges and trapping rioters downtown during the George Floyd unrest.
But I’m thinking of Swee’Pea, the baby in the “Popeye” cartoons, crawling obliviously through a construction site, from one dizzying girder to the next as it sweeps by, just missing pile drivers and buzz saws. Brandon Johnson’s naivete will be our shield.
Or heck, when the whole city explodes into chaos and ruin, and somebody finally finds Johnson, hiding behind a sofa, and drags him to a podium, and he is forced to address the disaster — “I encourage all of you in this room, support small businesses. Go get your broken windows repaired and your looted store cleaned up, by Black people in particular” — at least he’ll look really good doing it.
