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In an unserious Republican primary race, low blows have been flying—including about candidates’ footwear. The insults are petty, but they help reveal what’s become of national politics in 2023.

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Cowbot Boots and a Suit

Republican primary candidates are avoiding the elephant in the room. None of the candidates at this past Wednesday’s debate have a good shot at beating Donald Trump, and instead of taking him on, some have stooped to petty jabs and personal attacks. As my colleague Tom Nichols wrote in this newsletter yesterday, the debate was an unserious spectacle. One particularly unserious topic of conversation? Footwear.

At the debate on Wednesday, Vivek Ramaswamy used the phrase “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels” to describe Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, to which Haley retorted that she was actually wearing five-inch heels. The exchange was somewhat eye-roll-inducing, but it’s also a telling sign of how national politics has devolved. Politicians have always been subjects of public consumption. But Trump, a literal reality-television star, brought political figures further into the territory of entertainment and celebrity, with the surface-level fascinations that are characteristic of those realms. Trolling has become a dominant form of political campaigning, especially on the right, and we saw plenty of that onstage this week, especially from Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy’s jabs were undeniably petty, but politicians are public figures aiming to amass tremendous power, and their choices—including sartorial ones—are fair game for public scrutiny. How politicians present themselves says a lot about how they want to be perceived among voters. Their shoes in particular can either disappear into the background or make a strong statement. My colleague Amanda Mull, who covers consumer culture for The Atlantic, told me that, especially in conservative circles with relatively circumscribed dress norms, accessories are a place where taste and personality can shine through. “Shoes are a particularly powerful accessory,” she told me, “because not only do they hold the power to convey personality, but they also undergird the entire structure of your body. Shoes can change your height, your posture, and how you move through space, which are all things that engender social responses from the people around you.”

Shoes like stilettos can project a mastery of the feminine, and wearing cowboy boots under a suit, as DeSantis does, conveys a desire to send the message that you’re “not really some kind of desk-job dweeb, but a man’s man who chafes under urban coastal formality,” Amanda said. (Ramaswamy’s taunt at Wednesday’s debate alluded to allegations that DeSantis wears hidden lifts in those cowboy boots, which DeSantis strenuously denies.)

Haley’s embrace of her own heels is part of a long history of foregrounding her feminine footwear. As Vanessa Friedman noted in The New York Times, “Ms. Haley has pre-emptively weaponized her wardrobe for herself. She owns the heels in this race, just as she owns the skirt.” Friedman noted that Haley frequently references kicking rivals with high heels. When she was South Carolina governor in 2012, she said, “I wear high heels, and it’s not a fashion statement—it’s for ammunition … I’ve got a completely male senate. Do I want to use these for kicking? Sometimes, I do.” She’s returned to versions of that line several times since. So the DeSantis cowboy-boot allegations—surfaced in Politico by Derek Guy, the so-called “menswear guy”—landed nicely in her thematic wheelhouse. Sure enough, Haley gleefully teased DeSantis about it on The Daily Show last week: “We’ll see if he can run in them,” Haley told Charlamagne tha God, the show’s guest host.

Haley is savvy to try to get ahead of the scrutiny about her clothes and style choices that female politicians are often dogged by. Such criticism can follow a politician throughout her political life: Theresa May wore a pair of loud leopard-print pumps early in her career, and the story trailed her for years; British tabloids have obsessively cataloged her shoe choices ever since. When she became prime minister in 2016, she reportedly wore another pair of leopard-print pumps.

For male politicians, shoes can be a symbol of belonging, of joining a fraternity of power. The so-far-all-male line of American presidents has enjoyed bespoke shoes from the same cobbler since 1850: A company called Johnston & Murphy makes custom shoes for each commander in chief. Woodrow Wilson, a natty dresser, apparently broke with the trend of muted dark dress shoes and received white buckskin shoes. In 2015, the company’s CEO told CNN that it was prepared to make shoes for a female president, though so far the opportunity has not arisen.

Public figures’ shoes can also signal interests and priorities at different stages of a career: After leaving office, Barack Obama began appearing in public wearing Allbirds, wool sneakers favored by the tech industry, signaling his entry into a postpresidential tech-bro-chic life as a podcaster and a media mogul. As GQ noted in 2020, the shoes align with Obama’s identity—and help set him apart from his peers: “The outfit was nearly a decade behind the rest of the menswear world—but, grading on a presidential curve, Obama may as well have been Russell Westbrook in the pregame tunnel.” (The presidential cobbler does great work, but presidents are not known for their stylish footwear choices.)

Politicians can use footwear to put out whatever messages they want. But how we interpret them is a different matter. As Amanda noted, sometimes projections of cultural affinity through dress fall flat. “Simply invoking this kind of signal doesn’t guarantee it will be convincing. Cowboy boots with a suit are a little tricky to pull off,” she said, when everyone knows that you’re from the Tampa Bay area and went to Harvard.

Today’s News

Senator Joe Manchin announced yesterday that he will not run for reelection in West Virginia, putting Democrats’ Senate majority at risk. The White House announced that President Joe Biden will meet with President Xi Jinping next Wednesday in an attempt to smooth over relations. House Republicans continue to disagree over spending but are expected to propose a stopgap spending measure tomorrow to prevent a partial government shutdown.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: A nonfiction writer’s biggest challenge is to break down how the world works without being boring, Emma Sarappo writes.

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Evening Read All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

By Alex Tizon (From 2017)

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking into mine—my first memory. She was 18 years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

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