“Man Enough” For The White House?
- 03.10.2008 - 7:02 AMMaureen Dowd is worried that Barack Obama’s “impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign—the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.” This is a bum rap for Team Obama—they were the ones trying to suggest Obama was less effete, on Iraq for example. It’s Obama who’s been touting his childhood abroad and his Kenyan grandmother as evidence of his foreign policy credentials. Others in the media are fretting about his “toughness” as well.
So we may have reached the perfect gender dilemma: is Obama “man enough” to be President? That, really, is the question Clinton is raising in her own way. “Experience” is a dodge, a subterfuge for the real issue: the ability to face down both America’s enemies and John McCain in November.
Clinton has spent her Senate career developing a response to concerns about a woman’s ability to be commander-in-chief. She joined the Senate Armed Services Committee and voted in favor of the Iraq War, believing she would avoid the dilemma which faced Democrats who voted against the first Iraq war. And despite her feints and attempts to impress the liberal base with her willingness to withdraw troops from Iraq, she cannot shake her reputation for being something of a hawk. (She voted in favor of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment identifying the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, for example.)
Now it is Obama’s turn to prove he can stand up to Clinton and McCain, to say nothing of real bad guys like Fidel Castro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In this regard, his excessive deference to personal engagement (Deborah Tannen has something to say about that) as a tool of foreign policy and his cool, aloof demeanor work against him. Can he take a punch or throw one? Does he really understand that as President he’ll face enemies utterly immune to reason, enemies beyond the conciliatory powers of even the best community organizer? Maureen Dowd and the rest of Obama’s media fans are waiting with bated breath for the answer.
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March 10th, 2008 at 7:38 AM
I just checked out Tannen’s piece that you linked to. To me, it’s entirely possible that Hillary Clinton is, at the same time (1) somewhat disadvantaged by societal attitudes toward women and their behavior, and (2) a ruthless socialist out to remake America on socialist lines. His public manner aside, I sense that Obama also fits (2). Americans would be best served by refusing to be mesmerized by symbolism and victimology—and rejecting them both.
March 10th, 2008 at 7:41 AM
Now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty. If Obama really believes his dreamy rhetoric will have any effect in the real world, the country is in worse shape than we think. That means the Ivy League schools where he and his wife matriculated and supply our “leaders” have have become totally unmoored to any semblance of reality and float in a kind of feel-good blissful state where dialogue is all that’s necessary to overcome difficult problems. Remember George W. Bush staring into Putin’s baby blues and finding his soul. Look forward to more of that from Obama. Hillary has already demonstrated she’s a pushover for a strong-willed man. So if Democrats win, we’ll be unmanned. Perhaps the Harvard faculty that pushed out a president for suggesting that might be differences in the genders will have answers. If not, maybe their Yale counterparts do. Isn’t it time for Departments of Masculine Studies?
March 10th, 2008 at 8:54 AM
I think Obama merely needs to take a few cues from Alec “Are You Man Enough?” Baldwin….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TROhlThs9qY
March 10th, 2008 at 10:18 AM
MarkJ–
Actually this speech by Baldwin illustrates all too well what is wrong with the left today. Yes, Baldwin can make these make-believe scripted speeches, full of false bravado but, in real life, he is just a pathetic loud mouth; brave when he talks to like minded lefties and full of venom for all those to his right he despises, but not so brave when it comes to action. In particular I refer to his often spoken contempt for GWB and his vow to move overseas if Bush were elected. Well, Bush was elected and Baldwin, inexplicably, is still here and still spouting his usual mindless Hollywood venom.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:29 AM
When young women want to describe a male who behaved in a dishonorable or shameful manner, they say “he did a Baldwin.” In Alex’s defense, the comment is meant to apply to all his brothers, not just him.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:56 AM
Barack Obama has never had to fight for anything, so it’s not a surprise that he’s not good at it. The Democrats made him the keynote speaker at the 2004 convention when he was a state legislator. After winning election to the Senate against virtually no opposition, he decided that he was fit to be President.
He’s been on the fast track his whole adult life. This is the first time he’s come under serious fire. If he can’t take the heat from the most unpopular national political figure and a still very sympathetic press, he’s going to melt under real pressure, despite his reputation as Joe Cool.
March 10th, 2008 at 12:58 PM
“She joined the Senate Armed Services Committee and voted in favor of the Iraq War, believing she would avoid the dilemma which faced Democrats who voted against the first Iraq war.”
I can’t stand Hillary, but is it not possible that she voted in favor of the Iraq War because she thought it the right thing to do?
I know she’s shifty as hell, but it certainly is possible.
March 10th, 2008 at 1:12 PM
She thought it was the right thing to do for her career.
March 10th, 2008 at 1:19 PM
This is the problem with the Democrats: in a year when they could have nominated a quality centrist candidate, attracted a majority of the voting populous, and won the White House in a walk, they instead split between a grossly inexperiened progressive new style liberal in Obama and much-maligned old style liberal in Clinton. No matter who wins the nomination, they stand to repeat McGovern’s ‘72 landslide loss.
March 10th, 2008 at 4:57 PM
Damn, those voting underpopulated are screwed again!