Is He a Real Man?

Young, elegant and eloquent: Barack Obama is on his way to the White House-–and could fall into the Wimp-Trap, because that which helps him globally could hurt him at home.

That’s the way we would prefer the American President: better elegant than swaggering, better eloquent than rowdy. He should reject the death penalty and shun TV appearances dressed as a bomber pilot. He certainly should resist the temptation to see himself as chosen by God. He should respect and honor the United Nations (as well as us Europeans), and now and then he shouldn’t be afraid to admit that even the United States makes mistakes.

Voila! Enter the perfect candidate, Barack Obama. Tall, young, slender, educated. Not white, but then again not really black. With exotic names and an unshakable acknowledgment of the American dream but also a critic of American circumstances. Considers the Iraq war a colossal stupidity. If elected, wants to negotiate with rogue nations. Europe would elect him in a minute. “But watch out,” the French journalist Daniel Vernet warns in Le Monde. “Don’t let the Americans know that we Europeans are for Obama. That could cost him the White House.”

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Clearly, millions of Americans love those things about Obama that we Europeans value. Obama’s problem is that it’s exactly those qualities that provide the largest and perhaps the only targets for his opponents. Obama would surrender to Hamas and Iran, John McCain claims in his mass-mailings to donors. Obama is against capital punishment and would coddle criminal-–meaning black-–youth gangs, according to conservative radio talk show hosts. And his supporters are mainly latte-slurping, hybrid-driving Harvard good-for-nothings.

In American political jargon, this weapon is called the “wimp factor.” The strategy isn’t very original but it always proves to be remarkably effective.

For fear of the wimp factor, presidential hopefuls repeat the same ritual every four years: they show up wearing cowboy boots, carrying beer bottles and guns or at the wheel of huge pickup trucks. Some believe these props make them popular with white male voters who earn less than $30,000 and don’t live on the coast. This target audience-–called “Reagan Democrats” in the early 1980s but later renamed “angry white males” as a demographic group-–makes up not only a large voting bloc. It also forms a media test track on which candidates can be separated into “tough guys” and “pushovers.” In other words, it comes down to the question of how good a Commander in Chief they’ll be, whether they’re ready to kill and be killed for their country. This is precisely the battlefield on which John McCain will try to beat Barack Obama.

150 years ago, if you perfumed your whiskers you were a wimp.

The wimp factor operates according to a simple, old-fashioned recipe: you portray your opponent as effeminate, European and elitist. In the middle of the 19th century, candidates had to guard against the imputation that they “perfumed their whiskers” and ate “with golden spoons from silver plates.” A good 150 years later, Obama had to put up with criticisms that he watched his weight, was too intellectual and was a failure in the bowling alley and on the target range.

The criteria to qualify as a wimp haven’t changed much through the decades but the actors who use this strategy have. This year, for the first time, a woman tried to use it against a man. Hillary Clinton’s lightning transformation from wise “Mother Goose” (Vanity Fair) to “slugger” (New York Times) culminated in her beer bar threat to “annihilate” Iran if it attacked Israel. That was originally aimed less at the Iranians than it was at Obama’s position of favoring direct negotiations with the Teheran regime which sounds reasonable, but during an American election also suspiciously soft. At any rate, her circle of advisors, sure of victory, talked about her always having “more balls than her opponent.” This hyper-machismo didn’t help her in the end, but she undoubtedly gave John McCain a few samples of what to use in his campaign against Obama.

The first presidential candidate tagged by the media as a wimp was not a Democrat but a Republican. George Bush Sr. had to battle against being cast as a manicured East Coast college alumnus. The magazine Newsweek did a cover story on him in 1988 using the term “wimp factor” for the first time. He shed that stigma in 1989 by sending American troops into Panama. The wimp factor promptly became an exclusive problem for the Democrats.

Barack Obama also flirted with a strike against Pakistan

Above all, in 1988 it was Bush’s opponent Michael Dukakis whose intellectual demeanor and opposition to the death penalty led to his defeat as a “weakling.” Lessons learned from that debacle caused Bill Clinton to change the Democratic party’s course to a law-and-order platform and during the campaign he ostentatiously signed a death warrant for a prisoner in Arkansas, his home state. His successful labor and social policies came later.

Clinton escaped the wimp trap, but not so his successor, Al Gore. He lost the 2000 election partly because his opponent, George W. Bush, was able to put him on the defensive by labeling him an elite ecology nerd. Four years later, John Kerry failed because of the wimp factor. More precisely, he failed because of what his supporters considered his greatest strength, his status as a Vietnamese war hero who came home an opponent of the war, unafraid to publicly recount the failures and crimes of his own country. With such a résumé, he appeared to be the best alternative to George W. Bush who after September 11th, 2001, has been demonstrating an attitude of militant adolescence as well as trying to sell his incapability for self-criticism as a character virtue. But in 2004, Kerry didn’t risk openly going on the offensive verbally as he had done 30 years earlier, namely to say that the United States wasn’t infallible, and that admitting as much wasn’t a sign of weakness but one of supremacy. It also didn’t help when it was discovered Kerry spoke French and was married to a woman wealthier than him.

The tribulations of being “Kerryized” also worry Barack Obama’s advisors. But they should take consolation in one important thing: wimp factor strategy only works if the target rolls over and plays dead. How often have liberals longed for a candidate willing to say what is so obvious, namely that it’s not a symbol of masculinity to campaign on a list of which countries you’ll bomb and that it’s not heroic but living satire to swagger around in a bomber pilot’s uniform.

Barack Obama is possibly the first candidate who refuses to let himself be cornered by the wimp factor, the first to realize that one has to stay on the offensive during these media showdowns. Not that he wouldn’t make concessions in this game. For political reasons, he has already flirted with the idea of military action against Pakistan. And trying to out him as a professing opponent of the death penalty is apparently too risky. But unlike Kerry and Gore, he doesn’t shy away from Republican attacks. He actually comes off as confident, thanks to his charisma and eloquence. Willingness to have a dialogue with Iran is capitulation? Not at all, he says. Willingness to talk is a sign of strength. Criticizing America shows a lack of patriotism? No way, it’s instead a sign of authority and a spirit of optimism, of the finest American virtues.

We tensely wait to see how Obama behaves when the attacks get less refined and dirtier, when-–and it will happen-–ominous Republican Internet groups denounce him as a secret Muslim, as a softy beside a strong woman or as a megaphone for what they consider to be a constantly complaining black minority.

The rest of the world, including the Europeans, will only be spectators at these events. This is exclusively a discussion between the candidate and the American voters. Concerning the future policies of a President Obama, a sympathetic aura gives few clues to the Europeans. In all the Obama euphoria, it is tempting to believe that the first true multilateralist is heading to the White House. He is not that by any means. Furthermore, as president of the world’s sole superpower he cannot be a multilateralist. But he could give that superpower a more confident voice, able to convince most voters that he’s not a wimp. One who acknowledges that even America makes mistakes and is vulnerable.