Greenwald recently published a book entitled Great American Hypocrites. He starts by ripping the skin off the John Wayne mythos, then goes on to document how every Republican presidential candidate starting with Ronald Reagan has essentially run as The Duke: a man's man, swaggering, tobacco-spitting (in a virtual, you-know-he's-letting-fly-off-camera sense), beer-swilling (again, more image than reality, though it may not be long before we see McCain chugging a Pabst on camera--get the spitty bib ready), chummy, "all-American" kinda guy. And the less their candidates measure up to this image, the more they've had to turn the Democratic candidates as, well, fags. We all knew this, but Greenwald crystallizes it beautifully. And we're seeing it happen again. Let's follow along, while Glenn and I (well, okay, me riffing on Glenn's work) sum up thirty years of character assassination.
Please remember, we're talking lowest-common-denominator image here. I don't believe that real men exude testosterone, chug beers at a single go, and slap their wives around to prove their manliness. I don't believe that strong women are emasculating bitches. But to a great extent, this kind of image has been the central shaft of our last seven presidential campaigns. This diary is all about image and not about reality. Image wins elections.
Reagan-Carter. Reagan was the quintessential image candidate. Like his ideological scion GW, he successfully ran for both the California governorship and the White House as John Wayne. Hell, he knew the Duke, made movies with him. Both managed to squirm out of actually serving their country during World War II (while better men and bigger stars such as Clark Gable and Henry Fonda volunteered to fight), but during and after the war, presented themselves as Hollywood versions of America's Fighting Men. Reagan actually went so far as to tell Americans that he had helped liberate concentration camps, when in reality he was defending Tinseltown from liberal propaganda meisters--the same "dirty liberals" whom both Wayne and Reagan enthusiastically threw under the bus during the McCarthy era. Hey, real men rat out their betters with bogus allegations against their patriotism, right? So Reagan left his "ranch" and swaggered onto the national stage just in time to drown the hapless Jimmy Carter in a stew of Aqua Velva and testosterone. So much for "I've sinned in my heart," Reagan was not only remembered as squiring around one 50s starlet after another--a man's man, for sure, spreading those wild oats like a Real Man--he was now a Family Man, having married one of those starlets and settling down. Carter never stood a chance against the image machine.
Reagan-Mondale. Greenwald doesn't spend much time here, and with good reason. "There he goes again," and Mondale laughing like a sycophantic chimp, is all you need to know. If you're too young to remember this, go run to The Google. I'm moving on. (Greenwald does cite this campaign as perhaps the first time the line "San Francisco Democrats" made the national press. Credit that one to neocon Jeane Kirkpatrick.)
Bush I-Dukakis. Now the strategy hits a new phase. Bush I was a real World War II vet, unlike hide-in-the-soundstage Reagan, but he didn't come across as a tough, macho flyboy. Bush was WASPy in the worst old-money sense, flapping his wrist and asking waitresses for a "splash more coffee." Ewwww. Bet he wears pink underdrawers. Not much Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater could do about the nasal voice and the vaguely lispy intonations, but they could do a few things. First, Bush suddenly became a Real Texan, hanging around with his "fellow" wildcatters, discovering a lifelong love of country music and pork rinds, and forgetting about summering in the Kennebunkport compound. Ailes (who told Bush he came across as a "fucking pansy") and Atwater did what they could with the Ivy League mannerisms and speechifications, beating a Texas drawl into their boy and teaching him some real Texan slang. Secondly, Real Men beat the hell out of other people, so Bush went on the attack. One of his most successful encounters was a scripted attack against that hateful liberal, Dan Rather, when he came in with memorized attack lines and a rehearsed "off-camera" moment after the interview: "The bastard didn't lay a glove on me." Tough guy indeed. Atwater later said that the interview "solidified our base." Now that's what we want, a president who hides his real accomplishments behind a facade as fake as a pro wrestler's water-spewing ragefests. Dukakis--bland, technocratic--played right into their hands. Bush and his surrogates attacked him at every hand as a wimpy Northeasterner ("he's the pansy-ass blueblood, not our guy," even though Dukakis was the son of hardscrabble Greek immigrants who worked his way through, and Bush grew up in the lap of luxury, silver spoons bought with a fortune made by his ancestors collaborating with the Nazis). Dukakis's spectacularly incompetent campaign played right into the Bush camp's hands, with Dukakis running away from his solid and popular liberal politics as fast as he could scurry, and shoring up his own meager military service by being filmed poking his head out of a tank like a prairie dog. It wasn't just Willie Horton who skewered Dukakis, it was Dukakis answering the debate question about whether he favored the death penalty in the case of a guy who raped his wife. Instead of giving the Real Man answer--perhaps "It wouldn't be an issue because I'd beat him to death first" and imagine the cheers!--Dukakis gave a scripted, bloodless tape-recorded answer full of statistics about why the death penalty didn't work, with not one iota of emotion towards this suggested wife rape. We remember this, but we probably don't recall the "Sheriff Pansy" comic book distributed by Jerry Falwell and his ilk, featuring a cross-dressing, limp-wristed Dukakis in the title role. (Greenwald either remembers better than I do, or he's one hell of a Googler.) Orrin Hatch called Dukakis's Democrats "the party of homosexuals," and James Baker said of Dukakis the painted fairy, "He's the only man I know who could look at the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated and complain because the bathing suits weren't flame-retardant." (That's got to be an Atwater line, summoning up both the insult against Dukakis's masculinity and the slap against the "mommy liberals.") Dukakis became for the duration of the campaign a feminized kind of guy, a quintessential member of a party where the only members who have balls are the women. Greenwald has more, but I'm getting angry. Moving on.
Clinton-Bush. Now the strategy gets upended. Bush's handlers made some hay as portraying Clinton as a standard-issue de-balled Democratic male, with Hillary as the emasculating, controlling wife. Spy magazine had a cover with Hillary in the famous Marilyn Monroe skirt-blowing pose, except the billowing skirt revealed her wearing men's underwear and sporting a telltale bulge. Others lined up at that particular trough, including our "pal" Bill Maher. At the convention, Pat Buchanan called the Democrats a party of cross-dressers, sparking a fond moment of remembrance on Hardball, when in 2007 Chris Matthews told Buchanan that he and "everyone" in the press corps "got the giggle" over the line. But they shot themselves in the foot with their attempts to smear Bill as a serial adulterer. How could he be an emasculated candy-ass cross-dressing Democrat when he was getting so much nooky on the side? Score one for "manly" Democrats. The locker-room voters split, and Clinton took office just in time to rescue us from twelve years of voodoo economics.
Clinton-Dole. Greenwald skates over this one. More of the same--Hillary wears the pants in the family, she has a penis the size of the Washington Monument, Bill is a sexual deviant who might be molesting his daughter, oh yeah. But wasn't he having all those affairs? Meanwhile, you know old pre-Viagra Bob just wasn't scratching Libby's itch. Clinton won going away.
Bush II-Gore. Here we go. Like his daddy, GW is a standard-issue Ivy League candy ass. Unlike his father, he never actually did anything. Instead of flying fighter planes in World War II, he ditched his country by easing into the Texas Air National Guard, where he jetted around the Texas skies flying girls and marijuana back and forth. Not much here, though the photos of him dressed in his Junior Birdman getup were helpful. Bush I used to run the CIA, which might have been a bit scary, but was a man's job nevertheless. George Jr managed to run several two-bit oil companies into the ground, landed a cushy job cheerleading for the Texas Rangers, and, oh yeah, glad-handed his way through the Texas governorship, where he didn't do much besides gloat over Karla Faye Tucker riding Old Sparky into the bowels of hell. Got to do something. So they bought him a plot of scrubby land in Small Town, Texas, turned it into a "ranch," and filmed him working up a manly sweat clearing brush. Yer hands are soft, George, been countin' money all your life. Get some callouses, boy. Next thing, turn a negative into a positive. George Jr spent most of his adult life carousing like the drunken frat boy he was (and is, and always will be--Alpha Omega forever). Karl Rove, Atwater's heir apparent, and the PR squad turned that into a Moment of Redemption, mocking up a dramatic conversion to Christ with Billy Graham leading Bush to the pearly gates (I'm not questioning Bush's conversion--for all I know, it's sincere--but Graham's involvement is pure fiction. Ask Moore and Slater). A bad hangover turned into a Life-Changing Event, a Saving of the Soul. The angels wept. Even better, it inoculated him against the stories of him slamming around Texas and Alabama in drunken, loutish frenzies--hey, he's Changed His Evil Ways. Dr. Phil couldn't have been happier. Now that that was done, they played up on the Top Gun swagger George Jr has always had anyway--he was a veteran at pretending to be a Real Man, even ostentatiously spitting tobacco in his Yale classroom--and at the same time, turned Al Gore, who served honorably (if briefly) in Vietnam and used his own privileged upbringing as an opportunity to perform some real services, into just another emasculated Democrat who no doubt wears women's underwear underneath the earthtone suits. And like Dukakis, Gore's campaign played right into their hands. Gore shied away from Clinton and his lipsticked penis with a shudder of moral outrage, losing whatever locker-room cachet he might have been able to absorb along with the much more upfront problem of Gore running away from eight years of his own White House accomplishments. Gore wanted to have his cake and eat it too--taking responsibility for the accomplishments and running like hell away from everything else. When it came to sexual politics, hell, he barely knew Clinton to tip his hat to him on the street. By this point, the political press has become Drudge-ified, a school of political coverage that focuses on personal attacks and Freak Show coverage (I'm channeling Greenwald channeling Mark Halperin and John Harris). Druge, that right-wing filth maven, has become the "Walter Cronkite of his generation." Good God. Anyway, no matter how hard Gore kissed his wife on camera (there's a line between manly romantic and just plain ewww, and Gore crossed it), he was painted as the little boy robot whose batteries were being charged by the Emasculating Feminists that ran his campaign. The endless lies and belittling of Gore, the endless efforts to turn a good and thoughtful man into Little Lord Fauntleroy, did enough damage to make the election close enough to steal.
Bush II-Kerry. Over the fucking top. Kerry was French. He was a metrosexual. He was a faggoty windsurfer. His wife was not only an emasculating bitch who wore the pants in the family, but she talked with a funny accent. And Kerry was a molester who attacked a campaign worker young enough to be his daughter. (Of course he didn't, but tell that to Drudge, who was alternating between attacking Kerry and accusing Hillary of having a lesbian affair with a young Muslim aide--adds that flavor of terrorism supporter to the mix.) Not only did the flip-flop characterization work in a political sense, it impugned a sense of sexual deviance--is John AC or DC? Both? Inquiring minds want to know. Between the never-ending attacks on Kerry as a barely closeted fag (there's that word again) and the so-needed tearing down of his truly heroic Vietnam service in order to build up Flyboy George (including the final destruction of Dan Rather in a truly ugly orchestration of ginned-up outrage over the "fake" documents that 60 Minutes II used to prove Georgie got his candy ass shoved into the Air National Guard ahead of decent people whose daddies weren't multimillionaires with Washington connections), Bush again made it close enough to steal.
Obama-McCain. We're starting to see intimations of the "fag" strategy at work. Arugula, anyone? Elitist effeminite snob? Emasculating, controlling bitch wife? On the New Yorker cover, who was sporting the manly-man AK-47 with chest bandolier, and who was wearing the dress? We're off to the races, where John McCain, the sockpuppet who has parlayed five years of legitimate hell and torment at the hands of the North Vietnamese into forty years of self-serving political success. The Republicans haven't yet gotten a handle on Cindy, who has so obviously been driving the Straight Talk Express with her beer money and her ambition and therefore has her own Emasculating Bitch qualities. Is she a right-wing Hillary Clinton? Is she a trophy wife with a circuit board from Stepford Industries? Is she Cruella DeVille? And McCain has Bob Dole-like problems, with no one who is bellying up to the bar believing for a minute that Cindy is getting Manly Service from doddering old John. And Obama is showing disturbing trends of turning from a truly transformative candidate into another Michael Dukakis. The next thing is to turn Michelle into either Angela Davis--with a big assist from David Remnick, thanks for that one, big fella--or Kitty Dukakis. Alcohol addiction, anyone?
There are problems with that strategy. Obama has far more warmth and charm than technowonk Dukakis ever displayed (until the last week or so of his campaign, when Dukakis took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and made up half the deficit by going back to his roots, but far too little, far too late). And he will field IED questions about death penalties and raped spouses with a proper sense of manly outrage. But he's playing into the Republicans' hands by doing a Dukakis-esque, Gore-esque "run to the center." One more memorable "gaffe" that we might see more of: Obama's erroneous claim that his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz. It was actually Buchenwald, but that gave the conservatives a chance to hoot and slobber, yelling, "Hey, the Russians liberated Auschwitz. Was your uncle in the Red Army, you Commie?"
A word of advice. Stop running away from who you are, Barack. Stop playing into the Republicans' "fag" strategy. You don't have to put on a hunting costume and go tramping through the woods like John Kerry--we all knew that played out like a crock, even if Kerry really does go hunting on occasion. You definitely don't need to stick your skinny head out of a tank turret. Don't worry about bowling and drinking beer on camera. Just be who you are, a strong, principled centrist-liberal who has the courage of his convictions. You don't need to pretend to be a Real Man like Strutting George or Boytoy McCain. Real men eat quiche if they feel like it, put arugula on it, sip a glass of wine, whatever they feel is real. Real men certainly don't need to strut around like they're trying to emulate Nature Boy Ric Flair or that faux-Marine John Cena. Not only is it dishonest and untrue to who you are, Barack, it plays right into the Republicans' hands. You're already going to hear hell and thunder from the treeful of screeching howler monkeys that make up the Right's Greek chorus about your Kerry-esque flip-flop on FISA, never mind that you never really opposed the bill (sadly enough) and never mind that they loved it. All this fine-tuning and embracing the mushheads in the middle just gives them ammunition. Remember, they're going to have muy trouble pushing McCain as anything but a doddering old fuck whose best days are long behind him. So it's going to be a campaign about you. You're going to be attacked no matter what you do, whether it's eating arugula, hugging your daughters, or waking up in the morning ("bet you had to crawl out from under the bed with your Commie terrorist friends"). So just stand up, take the hits, fire back, and above all else, proceed from a center of strength and integrity. You can win this election going away, Barack, if you are man enough not to be a Real Man.
Edit: This diary has run its course, but I'll add anyway: best moment of the post-primary campaign so far has been Michelle's "fist jab" bit on The View. She permanently defused that non-issue by standing up to it and embracing it. That's how you do it, people.
