Barack Obama is not a tough guy. Everybody rolls him.

Hes a wimp, a weak

sister; he wont stand up for himself or his country. ladimir !utin, a true
tough guy, blows planes out of the air, wont apologi"e, walks around half#
naked. $ife, it seems, is like a prison yard, and Obama cowers in a corner. %&t
would be a hellish thing to live with such timidity. ' Hes scared of ladimir
!utin,( one )o* +ews contributor said about the !resident. But this kind of
thing is not con,ned to the weirder fringes- .aureen /owd pointed out a
while ago that former fans of Obama %now make derogatory remarks about
your manhood,( while the 0all 1treet 2ournals editorial page runs a kind of
compendium of %weak sister( pieces every morning, urging the !resident, at
one point, to make more %unambiguous threats(3making unambiguous
threats evidently being the real mans method of getting his way.
%Barack Obama is the ,rst female president,( 4he /aily 5aller, a 0eb site co#
founded by a former adviser to /ick 5heney, blared, without a trace of irony
or consciousness that female might not be such a bad thing for a !resident to
be. 4he /aily 5aller lists seven basic %manly( traits3courage, industry,
resolution, self#reliance, discipline, honor, and manliness, that last one
ba6ingly redundant but, hey, thats the way men are3and shows how
Obama fails in regard to each. 7Hes terri,ed of his wife, apparently, though
one would think that this is actually a classic 2immy 1tewart#style 8merican
sign of husbandliness.9 4oni .orrison wrote memorably, in these pages, that
Bill 5linton had become, in a symbolic sense, %our ,rst black !resident(3
meaning that 5lintons perceived faults were :aws of appetite, of a kind that
a racist imagination traditionally ascribed to black men. %His unpoliced
se*uality became the focus of the persecution,( .orrison wrote. Obamas
perceived :aws are the ancient e;eminate ones, of the kind that a bigoted
tradition ascribed to women; above all, the criticism re:ects the !residents
unapologetic distaste for violent confrontation and for making loud threats,
no matter how empty those threats may obviously be. 74he <oke, of course, is
that, with 5linton as with Obama, the symbolic substitute may well precede
the real thing.9
Obama3contemptibly, in this view3o;ers o;#ramps in the direction of
reason even when faced with the most fanatical opponents, who are bent on
revenge for mysterious, sectarian motives, and yet he still tries to appease
them. 8nd thats <ust the =epublicans in 5ongress. 1houldnt he be tougher
with bad guys abroad> 4he curious thing, though, is how much the talk about
manliness3and Obamas lack of it3is purely and entirely about appearances.
&n the current crisis over the downed .alaysian plane, all the emphasis is on
how it looks or how it might be made to look3far more than on 8merican
interests and much less on simple empathy for the nightmarish fate of the
people on board. 4he tough#talkers end up grudgingly admitting that what
the !resident has done3as earlier, with 1yria3is about all that you could do,
given the circumstances. 4heir own solutions are either a further variant on
the kinds of sanctions that are already in place3boycott the 0orld 5up in
=ussia?3or else are too militarily reckless to be taken seriously. +ot even 2ohn
.c5ain actually thinks that we should start a war over whether /onetsk and
$uhansk should be regarded as part of @kraine or =ussia. 4he tough guys
basically <ust think that Obama should have looked scarier. 4he anti#
e;eminate have very little else to suggest by way of practical action3e*cept
making those unambiguous threats and, apparently, baring your teeth while
you do.
0hy does this belligerent rhetoric still stir us> 4he 8merican political historian
A. 8. 5uordileone wrote a good book a few years ago about the birth of this
%cult of toughness( in 8merican foreign policy, in which she makes the point
that it was essentially the invention of liberals in the Aennedy 8dministration
3the Eisenhower and 4ruman people were more inclined to talk of %duty(3
who wanted to curb the suspicion that liberals were inclined to be e;ete.
0hat is strange, reading through her pages, is e*actly how e*clusively
focussed on pure appearances the cult of toughness always was. 8ll of the
arguments, the ones that led to the near#apocalypse in 5uba and, later, to
ietnam, were not about calculations made of interests and utility. 4hey were
about looking manly.
5uordileone Buotes $yndon 2ohnson in his retirement on the catastrophe of
ietnam, when he was still obsessed with the idea that, if he had withdrawn,
his enemies3by whom he meant, notably, =obert Aennedy, a founding
member of the real#man cult3would know that 2ohnson was, in his own
words, %a coward. 8n unmanly man. 8 man without a spine.( 1he goes on to
write that 2ohnsons words show a %deep psychological investment in
masculine self#image,( one that %has the power to subvert circumspection,
logic, prudence, morality and even national self#interest in matters of national
decision making, and create the illusion that there are no alternatives.(
4his business of looking manly even developed its own theoretical rationale,
the concept of %credibility(- if we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a
peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at
stake, we will be still more violent. %5redibility( is de,ned as the willingness
to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that
well kill a lot more people if we can ,nd a better one. 4his is the logic that
led to wild overinvestment in peripheral struggles like &raB, and is, in the view
of many of its proponents, too subtle for the feminine mind to grasp.
%& will do such things3what they are yet & know not3but they shall be the
terror of the earth.( 1o mad Aing $ear announces3and it is, as Bertrand
=ussell once noted, the 4ough Cuys point of view packed into a phrase. 0ell
show them? 4hough what well show them, and how well show them, and to
what end well show them, and what we will say to the mothers of the
children whose lives have been wasted in order to show them3those things
remain as strangely unsayable for the serious men as they did for cra"y $ear.
0e dont need tough guys. 0e need wise guys. 0eve tried tough guys, and it
always ends in tears. 4ough guys you know right away because theyre never
scared of a ,ght. 0ise guys you only know in retrospect, when you remember
that they Buietly walked away from the ,ght that now has the tough guy in a
hospital. 0ise women do that, too.