If elected, John Bolton would be the first mustachioed president since William Howard Taft

It turns out that John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, is serious about running for president.

National Review reports that he is hiring a team to explore a potential run in 2016, and is planning to test his message out during the 2014 midterm elections.

Bolton isn't exactly the GOP frontrunner. But if he did win the Republican nomination and then, somehow, the general election, he would end a drought in politics that has lasted for 100 years.

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That, of course, would be the absence in the Oval Office of a president with facial hair. The last man to sport whiskers while president was William Howard Taft, who, as the American Mustache Institute notes, left office on March 4, 1913, to make way for the significantly less hairy Woodrow Wilson.

Since then, no politician has sported facial hair of any kind. So what changed?

The first factor was the spread of safety razors during the early 1900s, especially after Gillette scored a contract to supply soldiers during the First World War. Before that, shaving was a long, occasionally painful process, which would explain the abundance of beards.

The clean-shaven trend continued in Washington, argues Slate's Justin Peters, because beards began to be associated with grungier elements of society:

Today, nobody would ever confuse Bolton, one of Washington's most hawkish neo-conservatives, with either a communist or a hippie — which could make him the mustachioed community's best hope of getting a candidate in the White House.

Unfortunately, he wouldn't have the support of K Street's foremost facial-hair lobby, Bearded Entrepreneurs for the Advancement of a Responsible Democracy (BEARD PAC), whose co-founder Jonathan Sessions once told TIME "that mustaches, soul patches, weekend beards —these are all things that do not meet the requirements of BEARD PAC."

He did, however, concede, "Goatees are considered if on the right candidate."

Bolton can at least take solace in the fact that he is in distinguished company.