Just before George Bush announced his running mate in 1988, a one-liner going the rounds was that he should choose Jeane Kirkpatrick to add some machismo to the ticket. Until midway through the campaign the embarrassing “fact” about Bush, as revealed in a spate of jokes, cartoons, and anecdotes gleefully reported or generated by the press, was the candidate’s “wimpiness.” A wimp, of course, is effete, ineffectual, somehow unmanly. Real men, the diametrical opposite of wimps, are war heroes and government leaders, especially combat pilots and spy masters. But wait! Didn’t George Bush become a combat pilot at eighteen, fly on fifty-eight missions, and win the Distinguished Flying Cross? And doesn’t everyone know he directed the Central Intelligence Agency?

Clearly, the phenomenon of George Bush, Wimp, has been grounded not upon the rock of objective fact but upon treacherous sands of image and modes of masculinity. Clearly, also, as Ronald Reagan recently and often demonstrated, the successful public man will cling to image, leaving fact to shift for itself. To do so is imperative when one’s masculine image is at stake. And in American politics, at stake it almost always is. Just as in the presidential campaign of 1988 George Bush fought to assert and reassert his masculinity—to avoid effete gestures and calls for “just another splash” of coffee—so aspiring or established politicians routinely must nurture a masculine image for the public, and especially for the press.

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