Because American politics aren’t thoroughly woven enough into our Victorian sexual culture, Tim Pawlenty pulled the threads a little tighter last night by introducing himself at the GOP Presidential Candidate debate with this line: “I am a husband.”
In case you haven’t been paying attention to the past few decades of American Presidential politics, being a “good” husband qualifies you to be the Executive in Chief. As the Weiner case reminded us, the personal is political when it comes to sexual practices (and somehow only sex—we never ask about a candidate’s food politics, how he or she treats their aging parents or yapping dog, or even whether they are kind to their spouses).
But if the tight fit between marital discipline and readiness to lead isn’t enough to make us believe we are all still Victorians, then surely the fact that GOP candidates used their platform to espouse the virtues of muscular Christianity, from a fervent belief in the Market to a deep and abiding understanding of the U.S. as both a Christian nation and God’s favorite Christian nation at that.
According to the GOP candidates, the U.S. is a right Christian nation. Herman Cain’s anti-Muslim rhetoric makes this fact obvious, although he did defend his company’s ban on hiring Muslims as only applying to those Muslims “that are trying to kill us.” Not only is the U.S. Christian, but unfettered capitalism is God’s plan. This religious belief in the market is shared by all the candidates. For example, Newt Gingrich argued that the market would have done a much better job in space than NASA. And all the candidates, including Mitt Romney, attacked the sinisterly socialist Obamacare, even though Romney’s health-care plan in Massachusetts is so similar that his opponents refer to it as Obamney care. The Husband Pawlenty said
We didn’t use top-down government mandates and individual requirements from government. We created market alternatives and empowered consumers. I think that’s the way to fix health care in the United States of America.
Yes, the Market is God’s plan for our Nation and has definitely been delivering us the best (read: most costly, least efficient) health-care system in the world.
As if all of this wasn’t enough to give us faith in the GOP, Tea Party darling Michelle Bachman, who introduced herself as a mother and a foster parent, came off (according to The New York Times) as
more substantive and better rooted in policy than Ms. Palin is… On Monday she seemed solid on her feet as she, for instance, criticized the United States’ role in the NATO intervention in Libya as failing to forward “any vital American interest.”
I must admit that is is extremely difficult to imagine Ms. Bachmann as ever solid on her feet since she’s wont to come up with crazy ideas: like getting rid of the minimum wage to solve unemployment and hating homos more than Cain hates Muslims. Indeed, this is the Bachmann who has said that gay marriage is the biggest issue facing our nation and believes judges are forcing second graders to “try homosexuality.” And this is the Bachmann who believes that there is no such thing as human-made global warming since
“there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”
But by now it should be clear that whether it is the Dems or Republicans, the mainstream media or the blogs, all that really matters is whether you are a good husband or a mother, not whether you’re wrong, stupid, and even downright dangerous. That’s why Obama has asked Representative Weiner to resign, despite the fact that Weiner’s leadership on progressive issues is untainted. Meanwhile, Muslim and homo-hating GOP candidates get taken seriously by the media because of their normative sex and gender roles, as huband, as mother, and possibly as the next president of the United States.
