In a provocative Salon article — “Hillary is from Mars, Obama is from Venus?” — Michael Scherer lays out what he sees as the upside-down gender politics of the Democratic primary campaign:

When Obama travels the country, he does not appear to worry much about posing with guns or wearing those khaki workman jackets that made Kerry look so silly in 2004. Instead, he sings an empowerment ballad on the stump that would make most lady folk singers proud. “The decision to go to war is not a sport,” he tells crowds, rejecting the male metaphor. “We can discover the better part of ourselves as a nation,” he says. “We can dream big dreams.”

In contrast, Hillary Clinton has run her campaign with all the muscular vision and authority of the macho candidates of yesteryear. “I’ve seen her stand up to bullies,” announced Christine Vilsack, the former first lady of Iowa, when she introduced Clinton at a rally in Des Moines last week. On the stump, Clinton repeatedly tells people that they should let her take control of the country, eschewing Obama’s more abstract calls for national soul-searching. “If you are ready for change, I am ready to lead,” she says. “I want to be the president who sets goals again.” [...]

Obama, who currently trails Clinton in the polls, especially among working-class women, has run a campaign that is virtually free of macho symbolism. He is, instead, a self-consciously inspirational candidate, who is always talking about things like coming “together for a common purpose.”

Readers who are concerned with the perceived “feminization” of the Democratic party, which they believe caused John Kerry, among others, to lose on the national stage, have responded angrily to Scherer’s argument.

But more conscientious readers have more substantive, thought-provoking critiques. They point out, for example, that Scherer is too caught up with the masculine/feminine binary, even while he is pointing out that it’s just a “social construction.” Why can’t Obama simply be labeled an empathetic, compassionate, consensus-building man? For that matter, why can’t Hillary be just a tough woman?

Race, moreover, might be a big factor in Obama’s reluctance to go macho, since Obama has the extra burden of dealing with white people’s fear of the angry black man.

Putting this discussion in a broader cultural context might help us understand better the gendered and racial pressures on Hillary and Obama.

Jenn Pozner of Women in Media and News breaks down the promotional materials for a new Fox reality show coming this Fall: “When Women Rule The World.” The tension on the show will come from the fact that “the men must accede to the women’s every demand, 24/7.”

Pozner points out that Fox is setting up the show to be part of a long-standing feminist backlash that demonizes strong, independent women. But, in the middle of a presidential campaign where gender is front and center, it also feeds into the inevitable strategy the Republicans will take to undermine Hillary, if she becomes the Democratic nominee.

If you have any doubts that Republicans are readying themselves, check out this recent randomly selected conservative blog post on “The feminizing of our culture”

Fox’s show seems destined to perpetuate the stereotype that women can’t handle power. Maybe more insidiously, though, it will argue that, even if women are capable, men just won’t take them seriously.

In this sense, a show like this doesn’t just affect women — and the social construction of femininity. In Pozner’s humorous but spot-on translation of Fox’s reality-TV speak, when Fox says they will be casting “unsuspecting men used to calling the shots,” she reads it as casting men “specifically because they are likely to say regressive, patronizing, offensive things about women, and possibly prone toward behaving in domineering, controlling, maybe even abusive ways.”

Although Fox and other will certainly argue that they are not holding up these men as ideal representatives of their gender, they will nevertheless become, once again, the only representations of men we see. The thoughtful, understanding man — one who respects a strong women and who is comfortable living in an equal partnership with women — will never enter the picture in this reality-TV framework.

And that makes Obama’s rejection of the traditional macho-posturing all the more unique — and all the more difficult.

It shouldn’t be.

Of course, Obama also has to negotiate what Clarence Page identifies as the “nation’s racial minefield.”

Page is reflecting on both a recent Newsweek poll that reveals generally positive American attitudes toward electing a female or black president as well as an essay in the Washington Post in which Amina Luqman discusses her mixed reaction to Obama’s understated performance at the All-American Presidential Forum at Howard University.

Page writes:

I am hardly the only observer to notice that Obama seemed to be containing himself as an orator during the recent Democratic candidates’ forum at historically black Howard University. He seemed deliberately avoiding the soaring oratory, rhythmic cadence or targeted appeals to black grievance that would spark applause from the mostly black audience [...]

Instead, ironically it was Sen. Clinton who showed the most freedom to give voice to black grievances. In the evening’s most memorable moment she brought some in the crowd to their feet concerning the disproportionate effect HIV has on black communities. If “HIV-AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34,” she said, “there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”

“For Obama to have said the same words in the same fiery manner could have been political suicide,” Luqman wrote. “By forfeit, Clinton essentially becomes the black candidate; it’s not a space America would allow Obama to fill.”

No, but that’s politics.

Obama dismisses the “black enough” debate in the Newsweek interview as a reflection of the nation’s state of mind more than his own.

“I think America is still caught in a little bit of a time warp,” he says. “The narrative of black politics is still shaped by the ’60s and black power.”

Most black voters, he says, care more about bread-and-butter issues like jobs, gas prices and decent education opportunities for their kids.

I think he’s right, but to achieve his presidential goal, he can’t get completely around the issue of race.

He has to go through it — and show the way for the rest of us.

Page’s final lines here are eloquent, but I think he misses the point. Obama already gets it. He is obviously aware of the “narratives” that surround this presidential campaign, and he is appealing to — are you sitting down? — the intelligence and integrity of the American public in the hope of transcending those narratives.

Obama could just become another character an age-old political story, but in a daring move in this mediated age, he is attempting to construct his own.