Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (6 page)

S
ince at least the 1980 election of the combat-avoiding, divorced, and playacting cowboy Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has relied on, and increasingly perfected, the same deceitful tactics John Wayne used to create his mirage of a wholesome tough guy. In all subsequent campaigns, personality and cultural images have far outweighed substantive policy positions in importance and emphasis. Republican campaigning since the Reagan era has been rooted far more in manipulation of candidate imagery than in debates over policy.

Throughout 2007, virtually the entire top tier of Republican leaders, both political and media figures, were little John Waynes—the very opposite of the virtues the conservative movement claims to embody. From Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill Kristol, and the rest of the right-wing noise machine, including our brave neoconservative warmongers—to say nothing of the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney—it is nearly impossible to locate genuine acts of strength, bravery, regular-guy wholesomeness, or any of the warrior attributes and virtues of traditional masculinity they claim to revere.

But a gullible, hungry press digests and spews the Republicans’ cultivated Wayneseque themes religiously, and this illusion thus persists and dominates our political process. At the center of this tactic is the packaged depiction of the right-wing Male Leader as a strong, courageous, and tough warrior, exuding in equal measure the traditional American masculine virtues and Family Values wholesomeness, along with a regular-guy anti-elitism. Virtually every right-wing Male Leader playacts as an all-American mix of John Wayne and Ward Cleaver—a tough, swaggering warrior by day, a wholesome family man by night.

The flip side of this equation is an equally indispensable weapon in the GOP arsenal: Democratic and liberal males are demonized as effeminate, effete elitists, and liberal women as emasculating dykes. Every national Democratic male leader over the past two decades—and especially those who have fought in combat and who remained married to their first wives—has been ridiculed as a weak and effeminate, gender-confused freak.

These manipulative personality-based tactics do not merely obscure real debate over issues and degrade our political discourse. Far worse, these GOP marketing packages are complete fabrications. They bear no relationship to reality.

This rank mythmaking and exploitation of cultural, gender, and psychological themes had its roots in the transformation of actor Ronald Reagan into a John Wayne–archetype cowboy who alone had the courage to stand tall against the Soviet Empire. Combat-avoiding George W. Bush—who spent much of his adult life wallowing in privileged, sheltered hedonism—became the swaggering, brush-clearing, fighter-pilot warrior whose courage and masculine toughness were needed to protect us from the Terrorists.

Both of Bush’s opponents in the past two presidential elections—Al Gore and John Kerry—volunteered to go to Vietnam; yet they lost those elections because they were portrayed as effeminate, soft, elitist cowards. In 2000, it was repeatedly suggested that Gore was controlled by the emasculating feminist Naomi Wolf and, in Maureen Dowd’s formulation, he was “practically lactating.” In 2004, Kerry was dominated by his rich foreign wife and was an effete, windsurfing French pansy.

That Bush’s and Cheney’s lives were completely devoid of any acts of authentic courage or toughness or the traditional masculine and moral virtues mattered not at all. The Republicans’ manipulative psychological and cultural slime machine rolled over reality and infected the entire media narrative, as it has for years. Millions of Americans who oppose the defining Republican beliefs nonetheless voted for Reagan and Bush 41 and Bush 43 and admired Dick Cheney because the contrived character mythology of the Upstanding Tough Guy versus the Sniveling Loser—drawn directly from Hollywood and Madison Avenue marketing methods—simply overwhelmed issues of substance.

The GOP—aided by a vapid, easily manipulated, and often sympathetic media—has reverted to this manipulative playbook over and over, for decades now. As psychology professor Stephen J. Ducat documented in his superb book
The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity,

Since the U.S. national elections of 1980, right-wing political propagandists have relentlessly, and with great success, linked liberalism to weakness, dependency and helplessness—qualities seen by most male-dominated societies as feminine.

Perhaps the most vivid early example of this tactic—the election where it really began to take root—was the total humiliation of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis by the burgeoning right-wing noise machine built by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes during the 1988 presidential election campaign. Ask most Americans today about Dukakis and few would likely be able to recall anything specific about the policies he advocated. Instead, numerous GOP attacks shaped Americans’ perception of Dukakis, and these endure today—endless ridicule over his awkward attempt to wear an ill-fitting combat helmet while riding in a tank; his insufficiently impassioned response to CNN’s Bernard Shaw about whether he would favor the death penalty for someone who raped and killed his wife; his “card-carrying” membership in the ACLU; and the weekend furlough granted to Willie Horton, the menacing-looking African American murderer who raped and killed helpless white victims during his state-sanctioned time away from prison.

Leading into the 1988 election, it appeared that after eight years of rule by Ronald Reagan the Republicans were in deep trouble. For most of the race, Dukakis maintained a huge polling lead on George H. W. Bush. And ironically, much of Bush’s unpopularity was due to the widespread perception that, after years of remaining meekly in the background loyally supporting Reagan,
he
was an effeminate wimp.

From the outset of the campaign, Bush’s primary liability was the perception that he—unlike the cowboy-dressing Reagan—lacked true manly attributes. He was regarded as a Connecticut patrician, scion of a wealthy and politically connected family, son of an aristocratic senator who preferred holidays in Maine and on Cape Cod. One of the most damaging “controversies” occurred during the primaries when it was widely reported that Bush visited a New Hampshire diner and, surrounded by blue-collar male voters, asked for a “splash more coffee.” That event merely confirmed the damaging perception that had long been dogging Bush, a perception that led
Newsweek,
upon Bush’s 1987 announcement of his intention to run for president, to proclaim on its cover that Bush was “Fighting the Wimp Factor.”

Professor Ducat, in his book named after that cover story, comprehensively chronicles the “wimp” and “effeteness” problems that plagued the first George Bush and threatened his political future:

“There you go with that fucking hand again. You look like a fucking pansy!” media advisor Roger Ailes bellowed at his client, the Republican presidential aspirant in 1988.

Unfortunately for then vice president George Herbert Walker Bush, political pundits and other opinion makers of the 1980s, like those of the 1880s, did not take kindly to aristocratic manners, generally seeing them as feminine….

This was a perception held as much—if not more—by Republicans as by Democrats. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s close friend Senator Paul Laxalt, and even Reagan himself regarded Bush as effete and unmanly. Newspaper articles appeared describing his life as one devoted to pleasing others. Conservative columnist George Will dismissed Bush as “lap dog” with a “thin tinny arf.”

There are multiple levels of irony here, beginning with the fact that Ronald Reagan, depicted as the epitome of salt-of-the-earth, manly courage, avoided combat during World War II, remaining instead in Hollywood as a coddled actor, while George H. W. Bush, by all accounts, heroically served his country during that war as a fighter pilot. Yet, as has been proven true so many times since then, the ability to playact as a tough guy is far more important in American political contests than reality, and Bush’s brave military service did not shield him at all from being cast as a soft and unmanly weakling, just as Reagan’s combat avoidance did not preclude his being hailed as a warrior-defender of Freedom.

Faced, then, with a losing candidate whose very manhood was in question, Bush 41’s campaign handlers launched a two-pronged strategy: (1) they expertly staged multiple events designed to make Bush look like a tough guy and, more important, (2) they launched attack after attack against Dukakis intended to depict
him
as the wimp.

One of the first orders of business in “masculinizing” Bush and converting him into a “regular, normal guy” was to highlight his connections to Texas while downplaying his real roots in aristocratic Connecticut. The campaign frequently staged events where Bush would don a cowboy hat, attend rodeos, and incorporate Texas colloquialisms into his speech.

Atwater and Ailes understood that central to their prospects for victory was ensuring that their candidate was perceived as a swaggering tough guy, someone who exuded what were perceived to be the virtues of traditional American masculinity and, when necessary, was capable of striking a warrior pose. And even in light of how little they had to work with in George H. W. Bush, they proceeded to pioneer many of the tactics employed to this day by the right-wing electoral machine to convert their leaders into John Wayne avatars.

In 1988, Bush was scheduled to be interviewed by Dan Rather, and the campaign learned in advance from a CBS mole that Rather intended to question Bush very aggressively about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. The Atwater-Ailes team recognized this as a key opportunity to remake the image of their candidate.

Bush was angrily defiant—uncharacteristically aggressive—throughout the interview, famously telling Rather, “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran. How would you like it if I judged your whole career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?” Afterward, Bush boasted to his campaign aides, into a live microphone: “The bastard didn’t lay a glove on me,” a comment widely reported by newspapers. As Ducat wrote:

It was the display of the manly attitude—angry defiance, in particular—that made this contest politically useful for Bush….

Lee Atwater summed up the significance of Bush’s performance: “I think it was the most important event of the entire primary campaign. It was stronger than grits in the South…It solidified our base.”

Just as Bush’s campaign was bolstered by the calculated recreation of him as a swaggering Real Man, Dukakis’s was continuously undermined by the depiction of him as an unmanly loser. And Dukakis himself, guided by disastrous advice from his inept campaign manager, Susan Estrich, seemingly did everything in his power to reinforce this imagery.

Initially, under withering attacks from the Bush campaign directed at his “liberalism,” Dukakis—rather than stand and fight for the term—ran away from it, insisting that he was no liberal at all, but rather was actually conservative, stressing his enthusiasm for Reagan’s policies of militarism and various weapons systems. Scampering far and fast from his own ideology made Dukakis look weak and unwilling to fight, and Ronald Reagan himself mocked Dukakis’s fear of his own positions this way: “We haven’t seen such a radical transformation since Dustin Hoffman played ‘Tootsie.’”

It was Dukakis’s efforts to prove his manliness—not by standing firm for his beliefs, but instead by embracing a militarism that was plainly not his own—that led him to his now-infamous visit to a General Dynamics tank factory, where he donned an ill-fitting helmet and uniform and awkwardly rode around in an M1 tank. It was the Dukakis campaign which insisted that his visit be filmed, ensuring the Bush campaign a potent weapon to mock Dukakis’s masculinity.

Dukakis’s perceived manliness deficiency was exacerbated severely when, after being asked in a debate by CNN’s Shaw whether he would favor the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife, Dukakis replied with a stoic and technocratic explanation as to why the death penalty was flawed, citing statistics and studies in an answer almost entirely devoid of any rage at the image of his own wife being raped and killed. As Ducat wrote: “After the debate, he was savaged by Republicans and most reporters for failing to summon manly emotions.”

The coup de grâce in Dukakis’s fall from manhood was the series of Willie Horton ads, produced by the Bush campaign, that accused Dukakis of furloughing into the community a menacing black male who proceeded to rape white women and kill their husbands. Dukakis was thus the soft male too weak to protect America’s women from being raped and too effete to protect America’s males from suffering that humiliation.

As Ducat documents, Bush surrogates devoted enormous resources to depicting Dukakis as effeminate and unmanly. Jerry Falwell urged his followers to disseminate a comic book depicting Dukakis as “Sheriff Pansy,” a cross-dressing, limp-wristed liberal. In an interview, Orrin Hatch said that Dukakis’s Democrats had become “the party of homosexuals,” while Bush family comrade James Baker said: “He’s the only man I know who could look at the swimsuit issue of
Sports Illustrated
and complain because the bathing suits weren’t flame-retardant.”

Far more than any policy issues, these attacks on Dukakis as unmanly and the accompanying depiction of Bush as a protective “ass-kicker” turned a huge deficit into a relatively easy Bush victory. Ducat: