Milwaukee
“Western societies have long acknowledged that facial hair is evidently a sort of performance,” wrote historian of masculinity Christopher Oldstone-Moore in the Journal of Social History in 2011. “It has been recognized as a choice, a display, and even a mask intended either to disguise flaws or assert a character type.”
Enter hirsute Randy Bryce, Democratic candidate for Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District and notable cookie duster enthusiast. Bryce, who has dubbed himself “Iron Stache,” has gained national attention in his quest to knock off Republican House speaker Paul Ryan. By emphasizing his robust lip sweater, Bryce has tried to imbue his image with all of the positive connotations mustaches confer—that he’s an authentic, working-class champion of the little guy.
Bryce, a 53-year-old former union ironworker and Army veteran, is trying to parlay this blue-collar aesthetic into electoral success—and given the titan he’s trying to unseat, his efforts are getting plenty of attention. Writer Anthony Breznican tweeted that Bryce was “genetically engineered from Bruce Springsteen songs.” The wry American Mustache Institute nominated him for their 2017-18 Robert Goulet award for “Mustached American of the Year.”
But it was a heartstring-plucking YouTube video Bryce released last June that began his rapid rise to national prominence and saw him featured in the pages of virtually every prominent left-wing publication in America. In fact, Bryce’s rise was too sudden—soon after his announcement, the vaunted Iron Stache appeared on CNN and looked lost in the bright lights. The media rookie stammered his way into endorsing a $32 trillion tax increase to pay for single-payer health care as incredulous hosts John Berman and Poppy Harlow tried to lead him to a cogent answer; clearly, he had less than an iron-clad grip on his talking points.
Nevertheless, Bryce began to gain attention from the Hollywood set desperate to reestablish contact with America’s working-class voters. Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon showed up at a Bryce fundraiser held at a Manhattan cocktail bar. Whoopi Goldberg name-checked him on The View. Cringe-inducing interviews with comedians Samantha Bee and Sarah Silverman soon followed.
(Sample Silverman question: “You’re a dad, a union leader, you’re Polish and you’re Mexican and your sister’s a teacher and your dad’s a cop, you’re a cancer survivor and you’re adopted and you’re a veteran—how do we get more good people like you to run?” Frost-Nixon it was not.)
Yet it has been Bryce’s relationship with one of America’s most prominent public inebriates, comedian Chelsea Handler, that has brought him the most attention. Handler jumped on the Iron Stache bandwagon and last September posted a group photo of herself and actresses Aisha Tyler and Mary McCormack posing with Bryce, each woman sporting a fake mustache. Since then, Handler has tweeted in support of Bryce to her nearly nine million followers dozens of times; on his website, Bryce ran a contest offering entrants the chance to get a beer with Handler and Iron Stache.
On January 31, Handler was scheduled to attend a $25-per-head public fundraiser for Bryce at a music theater in liberal Madison, well outside the district for which he is running. But after Handler posted a profane tweet attacking Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sexuality, the event was quietly canceled and converted to a $500-per-person event at the private home of a Madison-area tech executive.
What Bryce has not yet grasped is that his big-money Hollywood friends are using him far more than he’s using them. His savvy working-man image has allowed coastal elites to take a guy who has lost three local elections—one of them a Democratic primary—and use him to burnish their own blue-collar-friendly credentials. He is simply a walk-on performer in their community theater production of Democracy, the Musical. (Prior to her adoption of Iron Stache, Handler’s most notable cause was posting topless pictures of herself on Instagram to push the “#FreeTheNipple” movement.)
Bryce is nationally known because of who he’s running against, and celebrities want everyone to know they’re taking an active role in #Resisting Paul Ryan. Much like the white supremacist Paul Nehlen, who parlayed his quixotic GOP primary challenges to Ryan into national notoriety, Bryce is earning fame more as a tribute to his opponent’s political prowess than to his own.
In fact, it’s not even certain Ryan is running again, having yet to commit to being a candidate in 2018. Recent reports that the speaker was thinking about quitting prompted Bryce to issue a series of groan-inducing tweets suggesting that the power of his mustache was the impetus for Ryan’s indecision.
What no collection of comedians and starlets can paper over is the fact that Bryce is, at best, a third-tier candidate in a district Ryan has never won by less than double-digits. It’s not even clear he will make it out of the Democratic primary against high school English teacher Cathy Myers. His fame is simply the triumph of marketing over substance; the Democrats’ mustache is made of astroturf.
After months of uniformly positive media following Bryce’s announcement video, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Daniel Bice began looking into the candidate’s personal finances. Bice found that in 2015, the state had placed a lien on Bryce’s property for failing to pay child support for the 11-year-old son he featured prominently in his first video advertisement. Bryce didn’t fully pay off the $1,257 owed to his ex-wife until two months after he had declared his candidacy.
Weeks later, Bryce paid off another $4,200 loan that had been delinquent for 15 years. In 2004, Bryce borrowed nearly $1,800 from his then-girlfriend in order to buy a car. But he stiffed her, leading to a court judgment against him that he only recently paid back with interest.
Last weekend, Bryce’s name popped up in a New York Times article listing notable people who, attempting to seem more popular than they are, had purchased Twitter followers from a shady online vendor. Bryce’s spokesperson conceded that before he became a candidate, he had paid “about $10-20” to buy “1,000 to 1,500” followers,” as he was “trying out blogging at the time.”
It was just another example of how the Randy Bryce mystique has been built on a foundation of mustache wax. Bryce frequently rips Ryan for being a tool of his “wealthy donors” but has himself raised nearly seven times as much money from New York and California as he has from Wisconsin; on the night of Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address, Bryce even paid $1,500 to run a television advertisement in Seattle and San Francisco, far from the southern Wisconsin district where he’s running. (Bryce has defended this course because “that’s where a lot of money comes in from.”)
In the months following Donald Trump’s 2016 general election win, Democrats began plotting new strategies to win back voters in America’s heartland who live check-to-check. Randy Bryce is the Frankenstein monster of those strategy meetings; if he appears to be straight out of central casting, it’s because he is. Bryce is simply an empty mustache cast in Nancy Pelosi’s Hardhat Revue.
Give the Democrats credit—it is actually bold to hang a candidate’s aura on his flavor saver, an adornment so out of favor politically that no major party presidential nominee has sported one since Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. But one must look no further than the president to recognize that these are unprecedented times, and the left clearly thinks they have manufactured the perfect Trump antidote.
Even if it’s obvious Randy Bryce is just a disguise.
Christian Schneider is a columnist for USA Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
