My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn't actually know the intricacies of making a salad.

Yet it's true that looks matter in politics... It is also true that perfecting the outer shell has become an obsession in this country... Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and John Edwards almost always look good, and pretty much the same, in dark suits or casual wear. Fred Thompson always looks crepuscular and droopy. Often Hillary Clinton looks great, and sometimes she looks tired, heavier or puffier.

I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, 'Oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.'

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.

Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend.

It is men's worst fear, personally and professionally, that women will pin the sin on them.

Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he's just a fresh face on a Taliban creed - the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs.