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The Candidates’ Big Guns
The preoccupation by the presidential candidates and their surrogates over the candidates? image as both sports fan and participant is at best amusing and at worst disturbing. The notion that the sports preferences and affinities could have anything to do with qualifications to hold the highest office in the land strikes one as ludicrous.
But that hasn?t stopped a new 527 group, Football Fans for Truth, from exploiting it for all its worth. Two Virginia lawyers are out to ?help the American voter and sports fan determine whether John Kerry can be trusted to represent the nation both as president and sports-fan-in-chief.?
According to John Tierney?s Political Points in The New York Times, ?The group intends to publicize, among other gaffes, his praise for the Ohio State Buckeyes while campaigning in Michigan, and his declaration that his favorite player on the Boston Red Sox, his home-town team, was Eddie Yost, who never played for the team.?
Their attempt to emasculate the Democratic presidential candidate via sport is the latest representation of our obsession with masculinity, maleness and machismo in American politics, foreign policy and culture.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s use of the term “girlie man” to describe Kerry, and the Democrats less-successful campaign to show Bush lacked the courage to serve in Vietnam, are just two of the many references to ?manhood? (often spoken of in the sense of the lack thereof) in this campaign. The Republicans have had a field day conjuring up images of softness, effeminacy and lack of toughness in Kerry, identifying him as ?too French? in his style.
And so both candidates seek to develop macho images by associating themselves with sport, the cradle of gender identification. Kerry appears playing hockey, Bush looks oh-so-sporting on the ranch. Both pander to the readers of Field and Stream magazine, and both appear at some point clutching a gun in some type of woodsy setting.
?The candidates are devoting so much time to one magazine because they are aggressively courting the newest niche demographic: the rod-and-gun voter. As the online magazine Slate noted last week, Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have made several visits and even held a town hall at Cabela’s, the gun and sporting goods store with outposts in several swing states,? writes the NYT’s Kate Zernike.
She also notes that ?Sports Illustrated readers overwhelmingly voted Mr. Bush the better athlete and sports fan, a conclusion the magazine’s managing editor, Terry McDonell, finds baffling.?
Sport from its inception as a major cultural institution in the late 19th century sold itself to the public as a device for invigorating the males of the society who had grown soft in an increasingly feminized culture. This was reinforced by the importation of ?Muscular Christianity? from Britain in the form of the boys? book Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and its institutionalization in the YMCA in the late 19th century.
Baseball extolled itself as promoting manliness, college football built character and men, pugilism sharpened the aggressive qualities of the male species. None of these sports were open to women except in a support capacity as fan or team supporter.
As America entered its Imperial Age the language of foreign policy developed a machismo vocabulary of its own. Americans would be told to “stand tall,” display “aggressive” qualities, be “tough,” never show “softness,” never “back down in the face of aggression.” As Teddy Roosevelt, the penultimate sportsman and imperialist, put it, “We must speak softly, but carry a big stick.”
Lyndon Johnson used even more graphic language, describing the bombing of Hanoi as running his “hand up Ho Chi Minh’s leg” — foreign policy as emasculation of the enemy. In deriding those who were soft on foreign policy and wanted to negotiate or stop the bombing, Johnson dismissed them, saying that they “had to squat to piss.”
These are but a few of the images that have floated through the world of American popular culture and politics; the language of today is neither new nor surprising. Turning a snowboarding/kite-surfing/road-biking Kerry into a ?girlie man? is, unfortunately, a pretty easy feat.
Posted at 11:09 AM | Permalink | | 
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September 21, 2004 at 2:21 pm
As Director of FFFT, I’d be happy to respond to your thoughtful, but errant essay, at your direction.
September 21, 2004 at 4:15 pm
Hey Jeff, respond away!
September 21, 2004 at 4:37 pm
So what will the public use to further feminize Hillary Clinton when she decides to throw her hat into the Presidential candidacy in 4 or 8 years? Will they try to portray her as a manly brute? That’s the way I’d go even though I’d probably still vote for her over anyone that other party puts up…
September 23, 2004 at 8:35 am
Humor has great power. However, well deserved, ridicule is the sharpest sword!
September 24, 2004 at 3:04 pm
As baffling as it may be that sports fans think W is a better athlete than Kerry isn’t it even more baffling that the majority of Americans think Bush is doing a good job in Iraq and many still connect Iraq to 9/11? The media and W’s campaign of dissimulation are partly to blame but ultimately the American public is at fault for willingly being the dupes in a real life tale of the emperor’s new clothes.
September 27, 2004 at 1:25 pm
The problem with Richard Crepau’s analysis is first, that it takes the Football Fans for Truth at 100% serious face value; second, that Crepau finds absolutely no validity or humor in evaluating Kerry on his sports gaffes; and third, Crepau’s outdated view regarding machismo in American politics. It is therefore unsurprising that Crepau misses the mark.
First, is Football Fans for Truth “the issue” for this campaign? Of course not. Consider it a vacation from the deadly serious issues that confront the nation now.
Second, is the message of Football Fans for Truth without any political import? I’m wary of people who sermonize as to the “real issues” in a campaign (there’s always an amazing coincidence that the “real issues” are issues in which they have an overwhelming interest) or who, like Crepau, believe they have a corner on determining what may and what may not properly “have anything to do with qualifications to hold the highest office.” For example, we are repeatedly told that John Kerry’s anti-war statements mean nothing today. We are, however, rarely told such a thing by a Vietnam veteran or more poignantly, a former POW, for whom the activities may understandably mean a great deal more than “nothing.”
Similarly, though on a much less important level, Kerry has chosen to make a concerted pitch to the sports fan, to speak their language, to enter their tribe. To the extent he flubs the language, his pitch has consequences. To the extent he is revealed to be a sports poser, or to be a cog in a clever campaign to woo sports fans, it also has an effect. And to the extent he’s a man who, when asked his favorite Red Sox player, so desires to be convincing that he comes up with Eddie Yost - who never played for the Sox - well, there is the judgment issue.
Crepau is also concerned over an “attempt to emasculate” Kerry. Yet, Kerry wants the voter to see him as masculine, not as Alan Alda, and it has been in that clumsy effort that he has looked a little silly. This is not the product of a smear campaign. It is the product of bad tactics.
As for the impact of sports on American foreign policy rhetoric, for good or ill, foreign policy is a very high stakes contest. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Saddam, bin Laden, and now a–Zarqawi, they all calculated that the United States did not have the stomach to confront their particular challenge. In sports, a lack of guts and nerve means failure, and that politicians of any gender make the analogy is both natural and probably beneficial.
Last, there is Schwarzenegger’s good-natured use of “girlie man” and the charge by my group that Kerry throws “like a girl.” We stand by our charge and we have the evidence to prove it at http://www.FootballFansforTruth.us.
As for Arnold, when the humorless politically correct prigs did their standard mock horror watusi over his remark, the governor laughed . . . and said it again. That may be a watershed moment.
Manhood has qualities that are both negative and attractive. Humor and strength, however, are universal attractions.
September 27, 2004 at 1:39 pm
Jeff — nice nuanced response and your site makes me laugh out loud …
But nowhere do you build a case for why “throwing like a girl” is a “real issue” — why it would disqualify someone for the Presidency.
Is there a reason? Or are you just a provocateur — like the other conservative hacks (the other “Truth”-seeker) who aim to lower the level of our political conversation to the point where Bush actually sounds like he’s worthy of the office.
September 29, 2004 at 9:06 am
It would appear that Jeff is avoiding the details, just like the people he supports politically. Crepeau is spelled C R E P E A U. One mistake I can understand, but not screwing it up throughout your whole rant. Hell, Crepeau’s name is listed for you at the end of his post.