On Politics: The Democrats’ answer to Hulk Hogan
The Democrats' answer to Hulk Hogan
The latest, with 76 days to go
For better or worse, the image burned most permanently into my brain after the Republican National Convention was that of Hulk Hogan, ripping off his shirt in a display of testosterone-fueled camp that has come to be an integral part of former President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota will probably not do that tonight. He will, though, embody his party's retort to the mega-masculinity of Trumpism, one that has been playing out all week in Chicago as Democrats look to chip away at Trump's commanding lead with male voters so they can elect the nation's first female president. Democrats are presenting voters with a starkly different version of masculinity than the one on display last month in Milwaukee, one that celebrates Walz's penchant for target shooting and football while framing respect for women — and voting for women — as the ultimate manly act. It's a defining feature of a remarkably gendered election that is turning into a bigger partisan argument over what a man is supposed to be. "Real men respect women and their right to choose over their bodies. Real men respect the fact that women can be in leadership positions," said Mayor Brandon Scott of Baltimore. "Real men are comfortable playing back seat to women." Warning signsEven before Harris rose to the top of the ticket, some Democrats were warning that their party was leaving men behind. A New York Times/Siena College poll taken in July, just after President Biden stepped aside, showed Trump winning 56 percent of male voters, while Harris was winning just 37 percent of them. "I've always thought that the party had become, its culture had become over-feminized," said James Carville, who generated, um, a lot of attention when he told the New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd in the spring that there were too many "preachy females" dominating the party. "Picking Walz was, I think, a recognition of that," Carville told me today. "Everything about him just kind of screams male." Walz's public introduction has certainly leaned heavily on traditional notions of manliness. Harris talked up his target shooting. Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, told me that Walz had helped her diagnose car trouble just by hearing the sound of a whining engine over the phone.
But it's more nuanced, too. Harris has spoken of how Walz knew that, as a high school football coach, his decision to sponsor the school's gay-straight alliance would take on added symbolic power. And when I saw him address a Democratic women's caucus meeting yesterday, he made a point of talking about a news account that credited women for his success. "They said, 'You know why Governor Walz has been successful in Minnesota? He surrounds himself with talented women, and he listens to 'em," Walz said, as the largely female crowd cheered as if he were a rock star. Self-effacing speakersIt's not just Walz who is trying to redefine notions of masculinity here. I heard Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey cheerfully describe himself to the Louisiana delegation as "a single, cat-person kind of guy." "I'm perfect just the way I am," Booker said, making an obvious dig at Senator JD Vance of Ohio's widely panned remarks about childless cat ladies. When I spoke with Scott, the Baltimore mayor, he was carrying his 7-month-old son, Charm, to a round of delegation breakfasts. And the main-stage programming here has been replete with men praising powerful women, sometimes at their own expense. Doug Emhoff, the nation's first second gentleman, made a reference last night to how he left his law firm when Harris rose to the vice presidency and told the crowd of an embarrassing voice mail he left her. And former President Barack Obama began his address last night by acknowledging that speaking after a powerful call to action from his wife, Michelle Obama, was probably a mistake. "I'm the only person stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama," he said. It's hardly a surprising move in a party that is made up of 60 percent women, according to polling by The Times and Siena College, and one that is trying to elect a woman as president for the first time. "We have a lot of men in our party who love women, who like to support women and who value women," said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York. None of this means the Democratic Party is a feminist paradise. The party's leadership — including its chair, the president and both of its top congressional leaders — are men. The men speaking onstage showed flashes of garden-variety bro-ness, including when Barack Obama seemed to make a crude joke about Trump's obsession with crowd size. And the appearance tonight by former President Bill Clinton, who has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women and had an affair with a much younger intern during his presidency, could remind Democrats of the accusations of bad male behavior in their party's not-so-distant past. One moment Carville appreciated, he told me, was when Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president, removed his blazer onstage Monday night to reveal a T-shirt calling Trump a "scab," which Carville described as a "male word." He seemed willing to put his complaint about "preachy females" to the side, for now. "I do think the conversation has sort of shifted a little bit, I do," he said. "Sometimes the best way to declare victory is not to declare it."
How Walz's No. 2 learned his big newsWalz's selection as Harris's running mate has put his lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, in the spotlight. I met her this week, hours before she took the stage at the convention. When Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, learned about two weeks ago that her job — and maybe her whole life — was about to change, she got the news from TV. Flanagan, a 44-year-old Democrat, was on vacation with her family in Block Island, R.I., when she saw on television that Vice President Kamala Harris had chosen her boss, Gov. Tim Walz, as her running mate. "I was like, 'OK, family, I've got to get on the first ferry out. I'll see you later. Enjoy your vacation,'" said Flanagan, who left the island and made it back to Minnesota the next day. (Walz called her himself shortly after the news was made public.) Harris's ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket this summer reset the electoral map ahead of November, but it changed the political landscape in other ways, too. By selecting Walz, she instantly raised the profile of Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of the Ojibwe who helped launch Walz's political career and who will become the first Native American woman to be the governor of any state if Harris and Walz win. Flanagan met Walz nearly two decades ago, when she was a new member of the Minneapolis School Board training potential Democratic candidates, and he was a high school teacher in a T-shirt and tennis shoes who was interested in running for Congress. They won the governor's and lieutenant governor's office in 2018 — and shortly after the election Walz walked her through the details of treating her daughter's recent case of head lice. Flanagan has become a target of Republican critics in Minnesota who blame her for tugging Walz, who had represented a fairly conservative district in Congress, to the left. She has brushed off those criticisms and fashioned herself as an unapologetic defender of their administration's sweeping liberal agenda. "We really are in a moment where I think our elected officials are more accurately reflecting the communities they seek to represent," Flanagan said. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
|
posted by Goatz @ 5:05 PM
0 comments
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home