CNN’s New 8pm Co-Host Thinks Obama’s Problem Is He Talks Like A Girl
Apparently Kathleen Parker, WaPo columnist and newly minted CNN host, swallowed a MoDo pill yesterday. How else to explain her column pondering whether Barack Obama is our first female president (listen closely, that’s Hillary Clinton ripping the wood off of whatever podium she’s at today).
Parker’s column may lack the trite comparisons to fictional cartoon characters, however the message is the same: Obama throws like a girl. Too much Woody Allen, too little John Wayne. And to top it off he may be losing his presidency because he speaks like a girl:
No, I’m not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises, with which he has been richly endowed [pun intended?]…The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis [BP] that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell’s argument that “nothing prevents” men from appropriating women’s style without negative consequences.
Indeed, negative reaction to Obama’s speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.
It’s hard to know where to begin. Does this mean that Hillary Clinton would not have been able to deal with the BP Oil crisis? Or that Hillary Clinton is better at speaking like a man that Obama (hello again MoDo!) Or that Obama is paying the price for speaking intelligently? Or that Joan Walsh was right, and this nation has been so infantalized by a combination of overreaching government policies and the media we really just crave a daddy who will tell us it’s all right. No grey area allowed.
Perhaps it’s that grey area that’s been causing the trouble all along. The grey area of empty coverage space needed to be filled. And the grey area of where Obama fits in the national storyline. At some point it will be easier to make a list of the things and people Obama hasn’t been compared to in the mediasphere’s continuing effort to pinpoint exactly who Obama is than it will be to comprise a list of the actual comparisons. In the meantime, it’s hard not to wonder if this column is a preview of what we can expect from Parker and Spitzer’s new CNN show…lord knows the world is dying to discover whether Eliot Spitzer thinks Obama is man enough. In the meantime I suppose we can be grateful that no Bambi references made it into this piece.
Update! Modo weighs in. She thinks Obama is a humanoid. Watch below.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
