Tough Guys

Susan Faludi's piece in yesterday's New York Times expressed more artfully what I was trying to say here: the need for presidential candidates to show manliness is silly. I don't necessarily agree that Obama will be cast as the girly man of the race (all the campaign needs to do is get him into a pickup hoops game to disprove that), but regardless, any trend that resulted in George W. Bush being exalted (and elected, gosh darn it!) as a paragon of down-to-earth male toughness is clearly ludicrous.