cover image The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity

The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity

Stephen Ducat. Beacon Press, $25 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-8070-4344-8

Just as George Herbert Walker Bush announced his candidacy for president in October 1987, the cover of Newsweek pegged him with the emasculating headline ""Fighting the Wimp Factor""-a line that clinical psychologist Ducat (Taken In) says put the candidate, his handlers and eventually his son, George W., on the defensive for the next decade and a half. Bush's patrician habits-from asking for a ""splash more coffee"" at a New Hampshire truck stop to using effete expressions like ""dippity do,"" ""darn"" and ""heck""-would soon be replaced with a (strained) Real Man From Texas image. But if the senior Bush never quite convinced the public, or his own party, that he was anything more than a Connecticut WASP who used ""summer"" as a verb, Ducat argues that the Republicans had their revenge when the younger Bush won the presidency largely because he was able to convince voters that he was a regular guy, a true Texan. In this insightful analysis of the role male fear plays in politics, Ducat provides in-depth examples of the emotions that may have fueled the Right's attacks on Hillary Rodham Clinton and its animosity towards Bill Clinton. He stumbles a little when he uses his own minimal research to analyze men's psychological reactions to the Persian Gulf War but, overall, Ducat lays out a cogent theory for the motivations behind the good ole boy defense mechanisms. Though this book does preach to the converted, its fresh and complex insights may reach a new generation of swing voters.