"In My Day It Used to Be Called a Limp Wrist": Flip-Floppers, Nelly Boys, and Homophobic Rhetoric in the 2004 US Presidential Campaign

Abstract

By summer of 2004 Republicans had succeeded in branding Democratic challenger John Kerry flip-flopper. Less than month before election, that transformation seemed fait accompli: as Rob Christensen noted in Raleigh News & Observer, despite Kerry's Theodore Roosevelt-like San Juan Hill moment ... in Vietnam, the Republicans have saddled [him] with less rugged images of him wind-surfing, being vaguely French, and being master of flip-flop (par. 11, 12). Queerly enough, among issues Kerry was accused of on was gay marriage.1 Despite applicability of to Bush himself in terms of policy (the creation of 9/11 Commission and creation of Homeland Security Department, to name but two instances), this single sound byte typecast presidential hopeful as indecisive, spineless, and unmanly. Setting aside Kerry's astute deconstruction of Bush's so-called certainty as bullheaded solipsism and of flip-flopping as altering one's course when reason and reality demand it, I would like to examine gender stereotypes and homophobic rhetoric on which Republican strategists relied to denigrate Kerry in public eye and to crystallize, by contrast, Bush's image as machismo nonpareil-the farthest thing from limp-wristed flip-flopper one could ask for. The importance of understanding what Republican National Committee (RNC) and their supporters accomplished in emasculating and queer baiting Kerry lies in its influence on election's outcome, which itself can be measured not merely by pre-election polls and media coverage but also by jarring resonance of campaign homophobia in postelection Republican policy. Queer baiting Kerry dovetails into baiting queers. Homophobic rhetoric is hardly new phenomenon in American campaign politics; challenging manliness of one's opponent has long been part of that mudslinging game, as has discrimination and intolerance against gays and lesbians. As Canadian journalist Stacy Lorenz observed on Election Day 2004, a longer view of gender rhetoric surrounding presidential elections reveals preoccupation with manhood in much earlier periods (par. 2). Of Lorenz's examples, 1840 election contest between incumbent president Martin van Buren and Whig challenger General William Henry Harrison is closest parallel to 2004 race. Despite Whigs' emphasis on their candidate's virtues (as military hero from 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe), Democrats dubbed him Granny Harrison, caricaturing him as a senile, feeble old woman (pars. 4, 7). In retaliation, Whigs attacked Van Buren as champagne-drinking aristocrat who wore ruffled shirts ... and ate fancy meals prepared by 'French cooks' (par. 6). Aside, however, from fact that being manly and being French have been opposed in American imagination for more than century, 2004 campaign marks definite advance in use of gender rhetoric as mudslinging. Candidates in past presidential campaigns may have been mocked as insufficiently masculine (Adlai Stevenson was nicknamed Adelaide; James Buchanan, called granny of an executive [pars. 13, 10]), but there are few if any previous instances in which candidate's sexuality has been questioned-at least so openly and unabashedly. The stark and minatory innovation over previous campaign rhetoric is convergence of politics as usual with serious agenda for regulating public debate and codifying as law erasure of queers from civil and cultural landscape. A largely unbroken silence in public forums toward recent acts of censorship and intimidation makes advance, whether downplayed as pandering or simply ignored as hollow rhetoric, additionally chilling. Looking back on 2004 election, Riki Wilchins writes in The Advocate that [g]ay rights, women's rights, and gender rights are now at fulcrum of culture wars just as black civil rights were in 1960s and 1970s. …