Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (22 page)

Poor Mitt Romney and George Bush—such frustrated would-be warriors, wanting so badly to fight in combat but thwarted at every turn by circumstances beyond their control. So what exactly was it that prevented Romney from fulfilling his wishes to fight? A video narration that accompanied the
New York Times
article contained an interview with one of Romney’s fellow missionaries at the time. He playfully explains how he and Romney had found zany costumes, dressed up in them, and formed a group that had a “fun time doing little Vaudeville routines”—all while Romney’s fellow citizens were being slaughtered in the Vietnam War that he so believed in.

More repugnantly still, both the
Times
article and the video accompanying that article contain all sorts of quotes from Romney and his co-missionaries complaining about how very hard life was for them in France because it was so difficult to convert people, without any sense of how that “hardship” compared to their fellow citizens’ fighting and dying in the Vietnam jungle. It’s hard to put into words what twisted self-absorption and lack of empathy are required to wallow in such self-pity—exactly the same strain that led Romney, at a candidates’ forum in Iowa in 2007, to respond to a question about his five sheltered sons’ lack of military service by equating their work on his presidential campaign with other Americans’ sons and daughters who are in the Iraq War that Romney so loves and exploits for political gain:

QUESTION:
How many of your five sons are currently serving in the U.S. military, and if none of them are, how do they claim to support this War on Terrorism, by enlisting in our U.S. military?

ROMNEY:
Well, the good news is we have a volunteer army and that’s the way we’re going to keep it…. They’ve chosen not to serve in the military, in active duty. I respect their decision in that regard….

One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is by helping me get elected because they think I’d be a great President. My son Josh brought the family Winnebago and has visited ninety-nine counties, most of them with his three kids and his wife, and I respect that and all of those who serve this great country.

Although Romney claimed he was ultimately convinced by his presidential-candidate-and-senator father that the Vietnam War was wrong, he spent most of those years cheering it on—from the same safe and sheltered distance where one finds most of our right-wing tough-guy warriors today, the ones who understandably recognize themselves in both Romney and Giuliani. Needless to say, a centerpiece of both of their campaigns was how “tough” and courageously pro-war they are.

This reality, however, never prevents the media from oozing with admiration over the alleged masculine prowess of Republican leaders. After one GOP presidential debate in June,
Newsweek
’s Howard Fineman went on MSNBC News and—as the GOP candidates paraded through the Reagan Library, the site of the debate—declared Republicans to be the Party of Real Men, something that voters find “reassuring”:

[I]f you look at that picture and took away all of the writing and all of the words, and just had the image, could the American people tell that those were Republicans? I think the answer is yes. There is a hierarchical, there is,
dare I say it, male, there is an old-line quality to them that some voters, indeed a lot of voters, find reassuring.
And this is something that the Democrats need to understand. The Democrats are the “we are family” party, which is great, but this is the other side of the conversation and this is their home here. We really are in Reagan country.

This is how our political pundits routinely speak of Republican males whose lives are devoid of anything to justify it. The adoration is so excessive that it frequently is embarrassing to hear, and truly borders on bizarre homoerotic worship. Anyone who believes that to be hyperbole ought to consider the following:

In a June 2007 column,
The Politico
’s Roger Simon actually said that Romney is “[s]trong, clear, gives good soundbite, and
has shoulders you could land a 737 on.
” Simon had previously swooned that Romney has “chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest,” adding, “On the morning that he announced for president, I bumped into him in the lounge of the Marriott and up close he is almost overpowering. He radiates vigor.”

National Review
’s Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out “that Mitt Romney is good-looking—an observation by John J. Miller that draws TNR’s ridicule—has been observed by many political commentators.” And MSNBC’s Chris Matthews virtually declared Romney to be the Ultimate Male. From the August 13, 2007, edition of MSNBC’s
Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS:
Let me ask you about Mitt Romney. You know, I watched him on the
Today
show this morning.
He looks like a million bucks. Everything is perfect. Everything about him is perfect
—his look, his manner, everything, the shirt, never rolled-up sleeves, the tie always tied. That perfection—is that the Republican Party of the twenty-first century?

On the January 19th edition of
Hardball,
Matthews said of Romney: “He has the perfect chin, the perfect hair, he looks right.” On February 13, Matthews said Romney has “got a great chin, I’ve noticed.” And while Matthews and others have questioned whether Romney is just an empty vessel of presidential imagery, he is endlessly discussed in terms of his chiseled strength. What drives all of this is that Romney has fed every crumb of war-seeking rhetoric to the Republican base that they crave. And in return, the media dutifully depicts him as tough and manly.

The media’s swooning over the masculine magnetism of the draft-avoiding Washington lobbyist Fred Thompson was even more embarrassing, even more cringe-inducing. In May 2007, the aforementioned Howard Fineman went on Chris Matthews’s show and said: “Thompson not only is ‘tough on defense,’ but
he himself is ‘a tough guy.’”
In June, Matthews—while speaking with his guest,
Time
’s Ana Marie Cox—unleashed this truly bizarre rant about Thompson’s manly sexiness:

Does [Fred Thompson] have sex appeal? I’m looking at this guy and I’m trying to find out the new order of things, and what works for women and what doesn’t. Does this guy have some sort of thing going for him that I should notice?…

Gene, do you think there’s a sex appeal for this guy, this sort of mature, older man, you know? He looks sort of seasoned and in charge of himself. What is this appeal? Because I keep star quality. You were throwing the word out, shining star, Ana Marie, before I checked you on it….

Can you smell the English Leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of—a little bit of cigar smoke?
You know, whatever.

What can even be said about that? And nobody really seems to find this odd or disturbing or objectionable at all—that night after night, one of the featured “journalists” of a major news network goes on television and, with some of our most prestigious journalists assembled with him, speaks admiringly about the smells and arousing masculinity and the “daddy” qualities of various political officials, and that this metric is, more or less, the full extent of his political analysis.

Beyond its sheer weirdness, such a description is extremely difficult to understand, even when observing Thompson’s own campaign biography. Thompson has been a government lawyer, an actor, and a senator. Though Thompson does not mention it, he was also—for two decades—what a 1996 profile in
Washington Monthly
described as “a high-paid Washington lobbyist for both foreign and domestic interests.” This folksy, down-home, regular guy has spent his entire adult life as a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, except when he was an actor in Hollywood, and—of course—evaded combat.

So what exactly, in Fineman’s eyes, made Thompson such a “tough guy”? Fineman clone Mark Halperin, in a fawning piece in
Time
the week prior—hailing Thompson’s “magnetism” and praising him as “poised and compelling” and exuding “bold self-confidence”—provided the answer:

Even before his
Law & Order
depiction of district attorney Arthur Branch, Thompson nearly always played variations on the same character—a straight-talking, tough-minded, wise Southerner—basically a version of what his supporters say is his true political self.

And he is often cast as a person in power—a military official, the White House chief of staff, the head of the CIA, a Senator or even the President of the U.S. It could be called the Cary Grant approach to politics. As the legendary actor once explained his own style and success, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person.”

The only thing that made Thompson a “tough guy” is that he pretends to be one; he playacts as one. There is nothing real about it.

The same week, in response to Michael Moore’s request that Thompson debate him over health care, Thompson—showing what a tough guy he really is—filmed a forty-second YouTube video where he chomped on a cigar and told Moore to check into a mental hospital. Chris Matthews had
Time
’s Mark Halperin on his show to giggle with him like sixth-grade boys high-fiving each other after the cool kid they are desperate to be near (played by Thompson) unleashed some adolescent prank on the nerdy kid in the corner:

MATTHEWS:
Wait till you catch this….

Mark Halperin, is Thompson’s cigar-chomping chide a sign that he’s serious about getting in this race?

HALPERIN:
Chris, I’ve got to see your “Ha ha”!

MATTHEWS:
I have to tell you, Mark, it’s for real. I can’t fake it. But let me ask you this…

HALPERIN:
I agree.

MATTHEWS:
Is this the kind of winning performance that the avuncular Fred Thompson needs to win this thing?

HALPERIN:
I echo your “Ha ha.” Mega “ha ha” to you, Chris. Because that is exactly what this kind of campaign is going to have to be. He said he has said he’s going to run in an unorthodox campaign.

That kind of video gets the net roots totally in a lather. They hate Michael Moore. They like the jab. They like the cigar. It’s a total winner.

MATTHEWS:
So there is a right-wing net roots as well as a left-wing net roots?

HALPERIN:
Look, it shows that this guy has the flair for the dramatic. He understands what the net roots cares about. He was aggressive on immigration. I think right now that this guy is poised to come in and be a key player in this.

MATTHEWS:
He’s also brilliant, because the attack from a defensive position is one of the smartest moves in politics. There you go again. He posed as if he was defending himself against Michael Moore and took his head off.

Chewing on a cigar in front of a camera and telling someone to go to a mental hospital is, to them, what makes someone a tough guy—“aggressive” and “avuncular.” It is the John Wayne syndrome—costumes and scripts supplanting reality.

The same is true of Fineman’s mindless claim that Thompson is “tough on defense.” What does that even mean? Marvel at this quote from Thompson, from CNN on March 1, 2003, when he was urging the invasion of Iraq:

Can we afford to appease Saddam, kick the can down the road? Thank goodness we have a president with the courage to protect our country.
And when people ask what has Saddam done to us, I ask, what had the 9/11 hijackers done to us—before 9/11?

That is quite an incredible mentality, and it has applicability for all sorts of situations. One can easily extend it:

THOMPSON:
I think we should invade and bomb Uruguay.

QUESTION:
What has Uruguay done to us?

THOMPSON:
When people ask what has Uruguay done to us, I ask, what had the 9/11 hijackers done to us—before 9/11?

That mind-set can be described by many adjectives, but “tough” is not one of them. “Toughness” can be demonstrated by actually fighting in a war. Toughness is demonstrated when a political candidate tells people what they do not want to hear. Toughness is
not
demonstrated by sending other people to war. But people like Fineman (i.e., media purveyors of Beltway conventional wisdom) reflexively, and incoherently, equate blind militarism and warmongering with toughness even though it is anything but. The illusion of manliness clichés, tough-guy poses, and empty gestures of “cultural conservatism” are what the Republican base seeks, and media simpletons like Fineman, Halperin, and Matthews eat it all up just as hungrily.

Chicken-Hawk History

Few articles captured the right-wing pretense of toughness as well as the June 2007 cover story in
The Weekly Standard
by Dean Barnett, titled “The 9/11 Generation.” Barnett’s article contended that America’s current youthful generation is courageous and noble because it has answered the call of military service, in contrast to the cowardly Vietnam-era baby boomers who chose protest instead. Its reasoning highlighted (unintentionally) exactly what is so corrupt, ignoble, and deceitful about the manufactured image created by the right-wing political movement that has come to dominate the Republican Party.