Presidential Crossdressing

Back in the days when girls were girls and men were men (except when they were kidding around at USO shows, in Bohemian Grove or in prison), Republicans were Republicans and Democrats were Democrats. But in the 2008 Presidential campaign it seems like all the nominees are a bunch of political crossdressers, and I'm not just talking about Rudy Giuliani.

"Is this the Republican primary or a John Edwards rally?" asked the National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez, who has always preferred manly men and womanly women. She was referring to this Mike Huckabee comment at a rally in Michigan: "For those of us for whom summer is not a verb, for those of us who didn't go to fancy boarding schools on the east coast, for those of us who didn't grow up with a silver spoon, who were lucky to have a spoon — ask those folks and they'll tell you the economy is not doing well for them." Since when did Republicans care about working-class people?

Unfortunately, Ms. Lopez's schoolgirl crush on Mitt Romney (which, at least, is properly directed at a man and not at other schoolgirls) somehow blinded her to a statement by Romney in the very same article she linked to. "I want to bring Michigan back," said Romney. "I'm not willing to sit back and say, 'too bad for Michigan. Too bad for the car industry. Too bad for the people who've lost their jobs; they're gone forever. That's not the kind of pessimism I think that will make Michigan strong again.'" I'm not quite sure how she missed this quote, which was roundly attacked by other Republicans who asserted that not only would Romney not be able to bring their jobs back, he shouldn't try or even care. A real Republican should sound like Rep. Michele Bachman of Minnesota who said in a statement supporting the Middle Class Protection Act, which would protect the middle class by giving corporations a 25% tax cut that will eventually trickle down to the workers who still have jobs: "I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs."

Why are Huckabee and Romney showing sympathy for people who can't even find one job instead of saluting those who have two the way Rep. Bachman is? Yet some pundits even claimed that Romney's show of support for these lazy Michigan nonworkers was the reason for his victory and blamed McCain's very manly and straight straight talk, telling Michigan workers that their "jobs aren't coming back," for his loss there. Although McCain is walking the straight and narrow now, he has spent much of his political career as a political crossdresser, opposing conservative judges and torture, and supporting campaign finance reform and immigrants.

Michelle Malkin, who calls Mike Huckabee "an open borders drag queen" and despises John McCain, wants a real man to run for President. She wants someone who will not be afraid to deport all the illegal immigrants and kiss away the Latino vote for generations or to tell people who have lost their homes to "suck it up" and get used to living in the street, and has turned her blog into a personal ad for the man of her dreams. "I need a man," she writes. "A man who can say 'No.' A man who rejects Big Nanny government. A man who thinks being president doesn’t mean playing Santa Claus. A man who won’t panic in the face of economic pain. A man who won’t succumb to media-driven sob stories. A man who can look voters, the media, and the Chicken Littles in Congress in the eye and say the three words no one wants to hear in Washington: Suck. It. Up." But so far it looks like Malkin's desire for a real man has gone unquenched and she will have to make do with her husband.

Giuliani, of course, is not only a real crossdresser but the leading political crossdresser in the race. He has supported gun control, abortion, gay civil unions, immigrants and Democrats. In fact, he was a Democrat until 1975 and his flirtation with the party was no youthful indiscretion. In 1994 he endorsed Mario Cuomo, the Democrat governor over the Republican candidate George Pataki. Giuliani only sounds like a Republican when he is bashing terrorists with his handbag.

Republicans are not the only political crossdressers in this contest. Sometimes if you close your eyes and listen to what the Democrat candidates are saying, they sound just like Republicans. During the debate in Nevada the moderator Tim Russert gave all the candidates a chance to talk about gun control and they all sounded like members of the NRA. The candidates all support the death penalty with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. Only Kucinich supports gay marriage. Suddenly, they all seem to want to get tough on immigration and they don't seem so eager to talk about Iraq anymore. And while it's been years since Mike Huckabee said that a woman should be subservient to her husband and Ron Paul called African-Americans "animals," over the last couple weeks Hillary Clinton has been accused of insulting Martin Luther King and John Edwards has been charged with speculating whether a woman is too weak to be President in a swipe at Hillary. Who knew that Democrats would be split over issues of race and gender?

But while no pictures of Barack Obama in women's clothes have surfaced (though no doubt the Clinton campaign and their good friend Robert Johnson are looking for them), Obama wins the Hasty Pudding award as the most crossdressingest candidate after Giuliani with his sudden transformation into a Reagan Democrat. "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," said Obama. "He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." It is unclear what voters Obama is trying to win over with his salute to Ronald Reagan since most Reagan Democrats are now Republicans and they already think Obama is dangerous. Most Democrats nowadays would probably prefer a candidate who would call Reagan "an evil son of a bitch" as Glenn Beck recently called Franklin Roosevelt but Obama is too nice to do that. Although Obama's remarks apparently started off as a way of insulting Bill Clinton by comparing him unfavorably with Reagan, it appears that his dislike for Clinton has begun to eat away at his brain as it has many in the media. When he tells us that Calvin Coolidge is his favorite President, we will know that he has finally lost it completely.

Voting is confusing enough without candidates trying to mix us up even more by trying to appeal across the aisle so much that their contortions make them resemble Rose Mary Woods. What happened to giving voters a clear choice? Isn't that the purpose of the two-party system? Perhaps this is why some people are trying to draft New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a man who feels strongly about nothing except his crusade to outlaw smoking (which Mike Huckabee can't even keep a consistent position on). Although his candidacy could get a bump if Obama gets the nomination and someone snaps a photo of him sneaking a cigarette after he claimed that he had given up smoking, it's difficult to see who Bloomberg's constituency would be other than other billionaires. Faced with a choice between a Republican who sounds like a Democrat, a Democrat who sounds like a Republican and someone who doesn't have a party and doesn't seem to have any opinions at all, this election may make us all as confused as those Florida senior citizens who accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan in 2000.

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