Douglas Duncan (File Photo)

By Frank Ahrens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, Nov. 3, 1997; Page D01

It started out as a bargain, a deal struck between a husband and wife.

Camera-shy Barbara Duncan offered to give her husband a picture of herself. In return, her husband agreed to lose weight -- she was concerned about his health in general and the load on his bum back in particular. So on Monday morning, July 7, Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan placed a 5-by-7 framed snapshot of his wife on his Rockville desk and began dieting.

Since he was elected to lead Maryland's biggest county in 1994, Duncan had steadily packed weight on an already large frame. Now, for the first time in many years, he is noticeably thinner. Duncan has dropped 15 to 20 pounds, according to the knowledgeable eyeball of someone close to the county executive. The county executive himself will say only that he's "over 250" and wants to get "under that."

Being a fat candidate in today's image-driven political climate creates a risk even greater than heart disease: unelectability. Since the beginning of the TV age, voters have placed an increased emphasis on candidates' appearance, political scientists say. Voters, it seems, want candidates who look like network news anchors -- trim, healthy-looking, thick-haired. If Duncan hadn't put on the brakes, he'd be in danger of entering the Taft Zone.

Even before his days as a Rockville City Council member and mayor (1982-93), the 6-foot-4, 42-year-old Duncan has been a strapping man. He tells a story on himself: When he was running for county executive, he and the other candidates formed a gantlet at Leisure World through which voters had to pass to cast their ballots. He was shaking hands and smiling, shaking and smiling, as the geriatric voters navigated through. Finally, a little old lady stopped and peered up at him.

"What's your name?" she quizzed.

"Doug Duncan," he said. "I'm running for county executive."

"Well, I'm voting for you, you big, fat Irishman!"

The differences between campaigning and governing are many. Politicians who will suffer any number of indignities to get elected try to recoup some sense of stateliness once in office. Ergo, Duncan's lament:

"I'm trying to lose weight so everyone will stop calling me `Big Guy.' " Which, as every Big Guy knows, is a euphemism for "Fat Boy."

A century ago, though, politicians were Big Guys. And proud of it. America was expanding and so were the prominent men who were building it. After the horror and deprivation of the Civil War, America boomed. The measure of a man's prosperity was distinctly linked to the size of his gut. So much so, the collar-bustin', dickey-poppin' politician became the caricature of the American pol, thanks to cartoonist Thomas Nast and other satirists who drew them in bold adipose. The virile, robust American man was a vest-stretcher like Chester A. Arthur, not a gaunt garden hoe of a man like Lincoln.

But then, inevitably, scandal set in. "Industrialists" became "robber barons." Politicians became "fat cats" sucking "pork" from the public "larder." There was Boss Tweed, the Big Guy of New York's famously corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. Later came Boston's legendary Irish party boss, James Michael Curley, nicknamed "The Rascal King." Modern Irish politicians, especially big ones, carry with them the burden of history.

Duncan is, in essence, "trying to overcome his genetic inheritance and change from an old-style Irish pol to a new-style Irish pol," says Lee Sigelman, a George Washington University political science professor. "It's the same story as Teddy Kennedy slimming down once every six years."

Or President Clinton, who, after spending his first term exercising in highly unflattering, high-riding running shorts, dropped 20 pounds since his knee injury in March.

"I did well for a while, but now I'm struggling," Duncan says. "It's much harder than running for county executive. That's a walk in the park compared to trying to lose weight."

In the age of TV, image is everything. Since William Howard Taft (320 pounds), no chief executive has been obese. Moreover, the last bald man to be elected president was Eisenhower. Since TV, political scientists report, the taller candidate -- or candidate who appears taller on TV -- has always won presidential elections. Physical attractiveness plays a greater part than ever in electability. (At least in America. Helmut Kohl, the corpulent chancellor of Germany, published a best-selling cookbook with recipes for dishes like saumagen, which is baked sow's stomach stuffed with unmentionable things.)

"Fat politicians are at a particular disadvantage in modern America," says Jeremy Mayer, an assistant professor of political science at Kalamazoo College. "Baldness, ugliness and even excessively hirsute eyebrows a la Mike Dukakis are forgivable sins, because at least they are beyond the control of the politician. Weight, rightly or wrongly, is seen in America to be a personal, and even a moral, failing." This despite the fact that more than half of Americans are overweight.

Duncan, as far as anyone knows, has no aspirations for president (or chancellor). However, it is widely thought that if he is reelected as Montgomery executive next year then he'll run for governor in 2002.

Even if he dropped a ton of weight, Duncan would still stand in stark contrast to his predecessor, Neal Potter, who now sits on the county council. Potter is a low-key, wispy, Joadian character who was at least partially motivated to get into Montgomery politics because the Capital Beltway took away his family farm back in '61. He believed the county executive should have a diminished role. Duncan, a former AT&T executive, wanted to expand the executive's job and make it similar to that of a big city mayor (Montgomery has more than 800,000 residents).

At a recent lunch, Duncan ate a lean ham sandwich with just a "dash" of mayonnaise and a Diet Coke. He eschewed the bag of chips offered by an aide. He said the time constraints of his job -- rushing from meeting to groundbreaking to speech -- often preclude eating a healthy meal. Worse yet, "I could go to a lunch or dinner every night if I wanted to," he says, and load up on high-fat banquet fare."

He walks about four times a week, about three miles a pop, and is gently working up to jogging, which can be painful, given his herniated disk. But finding exercise time is difficult, too, as "sometimes you get home so late, it's a choice between exercising or spending time with your kids," of which Duncan has five.

He says he is so reticent about revealing his weight because he hasn't lost as much as he wants and doesn't want voters to think he's bragging about slimming down. He does, however, show that he can comfortably button his single-breasted suit jacket (48 extra long), which he said he couldn't do before he began dieting.

The weight loss has not gone unnoticed. Longtime Montgomery political observer Blair Lee IV says Duncan looks "great." But he is not surprised by the timing.

"When politicians get about 18 months out from an election, they start to shed weight," Lee says. "I call it their fighting weight. The emotional and physical go hand in hand as they gear up for warfare. I've seen it too many times with too many politicians. When you see a fat [incumbent] politician going into an election, you see a guy who's going to be upset."