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

By the summer of 2004 Republicans had succeeded in branding Democratic challenger John Kerry a "flip-flopper." Less than a month before the election, that transformation seemed a fait accompli: as Rob Christensen noted in the 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 the master of the flip-flop" (par. 11, 12). Queerly enough, among the issues Kerry was accused of flip-flopping on was gay marriage.1 Despite the applicability of "flip-flopper" to Bush himself in terms of policy (the creation of a 9/11 Commission and the creation of a Homeland Security Department, to name but two instances), this single sound byte typecast the 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 the gender stereotypes and homophobic rhetoric on which Republican strategists relied to denigrate Kerry in the public eye and to crystallize, by contrast, Bush's image as machismo nonpareil-the farthest thing from a limp-wristed flip-flopper one could ask for. The importance of understanding what the Republican National Committee (RNC) and their supporters accomplished in emasculating and queer baiting Kerry lies in its influence on the election's outcome, which itself can be measured not merely by pre-election polls and media coverage but also by the jarring resonance of campaign homophobia in postelection Republican policy. Queer baiting Kerry dovetails into baiting queers. Homophobic rhetoric is hardly a new phenomenon in American campaign politics; challenging the 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 the gender rhetoric surrounding presidential elections reveals a preoccupation with manhood in much earlier periods" (par. 2). Of Lorenz's examples, the 1840 election contest between the incumbent president Martin van Buren and Whig challenger General William Henry Harrison is the closest parallel to the 2004 race. Despite Whigs' emphasis on their candidate's "manly virtues" (as a military hero from the 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 a "champagne-drinking aristocrat who wore ruffled shirts ... and ate fancy meals prepared by 'French cooks'" (par. 6). Aside, however, from the fact that being manly and being French have been opposed in the American imagination for more than a century, the 2004 campaign marks a definite advance in the 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 a "granny of an executive" [pars. 13, 10]), but there are few if any previous instances in which a candidate's sexuality has been questioned-at least so openly and unabashedly. The stark and minatory innovation over previous campaign rhetoric is the convergence of politics as usual with a serious agenda for regulating public debate and codifying as law the erasure of queers from the civil and cultural landscape. A largely unbroken silence in public forums toward recent acts of censorship and intimidation makes the advance, whether downplayed as pandering or simply ignored as hollow rhetoric, additionally chilling. Looking back on the 2004 election, Riki Wilchins writes in The Advocate that "[g]ay rights, women's rights, and gender rights are now at the fulcrum of the culture wars just as black civil rights were in the 1960s and 1970s. …