It seems that Barack Obama’s performance during a recent campaign stop at a bowling alley wasn’t manly enough for Joe Scarborough:
During the March 31 edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist repeatedly mocked Sen. Barack Obama’s bowling performance — which Scarborough called “dainty” — at a March 29 campaign stop at Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Deriding Obama’s score, he said: “You know Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it’s a man, to be a real man.” Scarborough added, “You get 150, you’re a man, or a good woman,” to which Geist replied, “Out of my president, I want a 150, at least.”
Later in the show, after NBC political analyst Harold Ford Jr. said that Obama’s bowling showed a “humble” and “human” side to him, Scarborough replied, “A very human side? A prissy side.” Ford asserted that Obama, who reportedly plays pick-up basketball, is a “heck of an athlete.” Later, Scarborough acknowledged: “I’ll challenge him to a bowl-off. But basketball — he looks like he’s in pretty good shape. I would just have to post low.” Switching to football, Ford also said to Scarborough: “I’d throw him a pass on you, too. I’ve seen you. I think he could probably take you down the sideline on a post route.”
I was not aware that one’s manhood was dependent on one’s ability to hit the requisite number of pins with a big ball while wearing rented shoes.
(Apparently, according to Scarborough, it also depends on one’s ability to drink a beer in a bar in South Boston like you belong there. Like St. Ronnie could.)
Like I said in my earlier post, it’s important to call out misogyny because misogyny hurts all women. Here’s an example of misogyny hurting men — because the ultimate put-down of a man is to equate him to a woman. If we fight the idea that being a woman is not something to be sneered at, we not only raise women, but we deprive bullies of one of the most powerful weapons in their arsenal against men.
The issue of manliness is a perennial one in Presidential politics, particularly for the Democratic candidate. Republicans are presumptively manly, but Democrats, being of the “mommy party,” face an uphill battle on this score. And so you get a lot of photo-ops of Democratic candidates playing sports (Hillary Clinton, it should be noted, has already been deemed Not A Woman Because She’s Trying Too Hard To Be A Man, so she would probably be exempt from this nonsense).
Not to mention, you also get a lot of chest-beating from Democrats who think that the only way the Dems can win is to put up more macho candidates like Jim Webb, ignoring the fact that he’s not all that popular in the party and would never have gotten elected had it not been for George Allen’s “Macaca Moment.”
Be sure to watch the video or at least read the transcript for an example of the kind of anxious masculinity display we can expect in the general election should Obama become the nominee. What’s most amusing about it is that Scarborough starts off mocking Obama for not being a good bowler, then gets reminded that Obama is, in fact, an athlete and regularly plays basketball, a sport Scarborough respects. So then, he starts challenging Obama to play him, and gets reminded by Harold Ford and the others there that Obama could probably beat his ass. So he goes back to mocking the way that Obama bowls.
A word about the bowling: Bowling is considered a blue-collar, middle-American sport, and TV pundits with penthouses in Manhattan and seven-figure salaries like to fancy themselves to be blue-collar, middle-American types, and the Democrats as Chardonnay-swilling coastal elites. So another tactic is to cast the Democrat as some kinda snotty elite who’s not down with the salt-of-the-earth types:
SCARBOROUGH: Baby, if you go to Altoona, Pennsylvania, on a Saturday night and you’re going to try to bowl —
SCARBOROUGH: — he didn’t go bowling in Cambridge that much. That’s a guy that’s been studying a lot of — reading a lot of books.
FORD: But he looked like — I mean, he looked like folks, he looked like an American. A Pennsylvanian — he looked like someone, day in and day out —
[crosstalk]
[Mika] BRZEZINSKI: No, no, no.
SCARBOROUGH: He was bowling in his tie —
FORD: — except the bowling. The bowling hurt it.
Ford pulled it out by mentioning the basketball, which is hard to spin as an elitist sport. But expect more of this kind of crap later on, if the 2004 election is any guide. Simply being an athlete isn’t enough; you have to be an athlete in the right sports that send the right message. For instance, John Kerry is very athletic, but he was photographed windsurfing, which was tagged elitist, and thereafter, all you ever heard about was the cost of his equipment even in non-elitist sports like mountain biking. On the other extreme, Bill Clinton was mocked by the press for his cheerfully lousy golf game, because the narrative was that he was some kind of hillbilly interloper and didn’t belong in Washington.
It will be interesting to see how the campaign handles these narratives as the election goes on. I also wonder how they’ll deal with the expected hunting photo-ops in the fall.