I’m quoted twice in Jennifer Parker’s abcnews.com story about the significance of the presidential candidates’ theme songs. It’s a nice, wide-ranging piece about how the candidates are tapping into pop music to add a boost to their campaigns.

Of course, I had a lot more to say than what Jennifer was able to quote. So I thought I’d use this space to expand on my comments — specifically on why Hillary is the only candidate to use female artists and why the songs prove yet again that Republicans lean heavily on a very limited rugged individualist, hyper-masculine narrative.

The only notable songs from the campaign trail are Hillary’s — and that’s not because Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5″ is a hidden work of literary genius. It’s because Hillary is the only candidate from which we hear a female voice (with the exception of Obama invoking Aretha). That might seem obvious, but it’s actually counter-intuitive.

For awhile I felt that Hillary was going to lengths (and the media was complying) not to make gender a part of the campaign. Learning the Pat Schroeder lesson, she rarely showed emotion. Going further back, moreover, she had long been positioning herself in the Senate (until her infamous vote endorsing the Iraq War became unpopular) as a defense hawk. No one was going to accuse her of being “soft.”

So for her to make the music of Parton and Gloria Estefan a central part of her campaign rallies — and to choose a song from Big Head Todd that focuses on how a woman is changing the world — is an intriguing choice.

Part of it can be explained, though, by her fairly recent realization that her perceived weakness is her greatest strength. Older white women voters are her strongest voting bloc — and appeals to them (whether through her emotional outburst leading up to the New Hampshire primary or in her music) have solidified her campaign.

It can also be explained, though, in the realization that Americans — or at least Democrats — are sick of the rugged individualist, hyper-masculine narrative that Rove-Bush has sold us the past eight years. Feminine is in.

Don’t believe me? Just try to picture Barack hunting for votes in camouflage. His authenticity and sensitivity (or at least his construction of an authentic and sensitive image) wouldn’t allow it. He’s the Oprah candidate.

The Republicans just don’t get this shift in voter sentiment — and that might been the true sign of their doom in the general election. Their song choices reveal how much they hope to ride an old-fashioned American desire for that powerful father. Whether it’s Romney becoming the man of “action” (with an underlying sexual potency) through the remix of Elvis’ “A Little Less Conversation” or Huckabee calling up the husky, frontier tone of Bon Jovi, Mellencamp and Springsteen.

It’s no coincidence that Huckabee misreads Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as a patriotric ballad as Reagan did in 1984. All the candidates — even McCain — have desperately tried to connect with Reagan’s legacy during the campaign. Part of that is their attempt to dissociate themselves with the faux cowboy George W. Bush — but most of it is an attempt to take America back to that patriarchal fantasyland that Reagan represents.

McCain’s choice of ABBA’s “Take a Chance on Me” is, admittedly, inexplicable by this theory or any other. But it’s not enough to distance McCain from the masculinity trap his party has set for him.