I assume you mean, Why would a man who could attract a beautiful woman settle for one who is ordinary-looking? The best example is Bill Clinton, who could have had any woman he wanted when he was a student at Yale Law School.

When Bill Clinton first brought Hillary Rodham home, his mother, Virginia Kelley, "didn't know what to think."

"No makeup. Coke-bottle glasses. Brown hair with no apparent style," wrote Kelley in a memoir to be published posthumously next month. "Even though Roger and I were polite, I guess our expressions gave us away, because the minute Hillary went to her bedroom to unpack her bag, Bill shot us a withering look."

" 'I want you to know that I've had it up to here with beauty queens,' " young Clinton told them, lecturing his mother and half brother like "two bad children."

Beautiful women had been as much a part of Clinton's Arkansas landscape as his political ambitions, but by the time he brought Hillary Rodham home to Hot Springs to meet his mother in the early 1970s he made it clear that it was brains that now mattered to him -- not looks. "I have to have somebody I can talk with. Do you understand that?" he demanded.

Bill Clinton and I are roughly the same age. If I were in his position, I would have opted for less brains and better looks, but there is no accounting for taste. Young Hillary: