DE GUSTIBUS
Fantastic Voyage
Howard Dean, metrosexual, heads south.
opinionjournal.com
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BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, November 7, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
In dictionaries to come, the following entry--"petard, hoist with one's own"--should be accompanied by a picture of a disconsolate Howard Dean.
Mr. Dean, in the space of a week, claimed first to be a "metrosexual" and, later, to be a presidential candidate "for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks." How he could possibly be both is a mystery to your humble servant, a non-metrosexual, non-Confederate, reflexively skeptical newspaperman. Can one really rest one's Perrier on a gun-rack? Or sip Burgundy with one's savory cheese-food snack?
Mr. Dean was undone by his own devices, and the petard here is that thing we call political correctness. In making his metrosexual gambit, Mr. Dean was shaking a slinky leg at the PC gallery. His intended message was that he was not a redneck but, instead, a soothing, refined sort of mensch, cool with, you know, the gay thing, his feminine side and all those factors that matter to non-Middle American voters. It's as if he were making a play to be editor of The New York Times Sunday Magazine or, were he not twice the in-house age limit, of The New Republic.
Reams have been written on the definition of "metrosexual" in the days since Mr. Dean uttered the word. Coined a decade ago by a British writer, it might be to said to be, in its gist, a "non-threatening" way of coming out as a heterosexual. In other words, you concede that heterosexuality is inherently threatening to those who are differently sexed, and apologize for the ambient menace.
Throw in elements of preening and primping and you have the finished article. That this particular male type should find his way into public service is hardly a shock. In any country in which a candidate must be telegenic to achieve office, it's safe to assume that there is a certain amount of buffing and steaming going on in back rooms--rooms that were once smoke-filled but are now smoke-deprived (not good for the complexion!).
As the presidential election draws closer, we can count on more politicians brandishing the conveniently labeled group identities that, according to advertisers and style editors, define us. If the candidates are not metrosexuals, we may hear that they are Nascar dads, soccer moms, book-group swingles, bobos, middle youths, prime timers or perhaps all of the above if the fund-raiser happens to be taking place in San Francisco.
Mr. Dean's metrosexual halo lasted but six days. No sooner had he uttered the words "Confederate flag" and "pickup truck" than the juggernaut of verbal rectitude came rumbling fast in his direction, threatening to flatten him as he stood exposed on the political freeway. No metrosexuals, it scarcely needs saying, came to his defense. And why would they? I mean, did you see any "poor whites" applauding when Mr. Dean drew attention to his sensitive, "metro" side?
Although one cannot completely discount the existence of the odd closet metrosexual among the country's pickup-owning classes, these are mutually exclusive social categories. Given America's current of upward mobility, however, it is almost certain that a few pickup owners graduate into the metrosexual stratum every year. The point is, these are groups that view each other with profound hostility--across a gulf that is wider than the one between Dominique de Villepin and Donald Rumsfeld.
So what was Mr. Dean thinking? One explanation, the sympathetic one, is that he read his party's ailment right and sought to remedy it--only clumsily. The Democrats cannot compete as a national political force if they continue to shrink down to being the party of the liberal élite. To win, especially in these times of war and heightened insecurity, the party needs to be a broad tent and to secure the votes of those whom Mr. Dean caricatured as "Confederate" types with an inflexible attachment to a particular mode of transport. Mr. Dean's choice of imagery is, if anything, confirmation of his metrosexuality. He saw Southern blue-collar whites as the Other. But, to his credit, he is trying at least to woo them. Most metrosexuals, one suspects, would rather incinerate every pickup truck in the land.
Yet how ironic it is, and how delicious, that Mr. Dean has been tripped up by the same forces of political correctness to which he sought to appeal. Let's be clear: I'm not gloating. I actually like Mr. Dean, particularly his unfashionable abdominal bulk ("gut," in Confederate English). His politics aside, he's the only Democratic candidate I'd ask home to dinner--though I'd put my wife's (expensive) moisturizer under lock and key. "Howard," I'd say, "the Decleor is for dessert. You'll get some if you eat up all your meat loaf. Now there's a good chap . . ."
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. |
