It's no surprise that the Republicans excel at this craft. The corporate class they draw from has had to think long and hard about the primal aspects of identification. Knowing how to manipulate sexual fantasies is crucial to the process of shaping consumer demand. With the same practiced expertise, the Republicans have stoked white male anxiety, positioning themselves as "the Daddy Party" while linking their competition with every attempt to deconstruct the patriarchy that feminism and queer theory devised. The Democrats have been caught in this well-laid trap. The more they reach out to good old boys, the more they risk alienating feminists and blacks; and the more they embrace liberal values, the more they lose straight white men. This is no minor quandary. White guys are 39 percent of the electorate, and by now only 22 percent of them identify as Democrats. To understand why the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy is in such parlous shape, you have only to look at how the dude vote has gravitated to the GOP.

At the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council, this "white male problem" has become the subject of whole conferences. Dean may lambaste the DLC as "the Republican part of the Democratic Party," but he's borrowed page after page from its gender-politics playbook. Dean wasn't just whistling Dixie when he made his infamous remark about reaching out to bubbas bearing Confederate flags. Even when he apologized, he didn't back down from the agenda behind that comment. In cultivating the National Rifle Association, denying that he's a liberal, signaling his flexibility on affirmative action and insisting that he's not really for gay marriage (just civil unions), Dean is playing to pissed-off white guys.

It's far from clear that this flirtation will succeed, since Dean is surrounded by the very people good old boys love to hate, starting with gay couples and antiwar activists. Still, Dean thinks he can win back a bloc of Reagan Democrats by addressing blue-collar issues (gingerly). He's certainly no Dennis Kucinich, in substance or style. As historian Douglas Brinkley told the New York Times, Kucinich echoes a time when heroic men projected "a gender-blend" of sensitivity and aggression. This "1960s version of masculinity" may be why Kucinich's short stature is often mentioned in the media, while Dean seldom gets that treatment, though he's not a lot taller. If Kucinich is a vegan, Dean acts like a man who likes his steak blood-rare and his politics cutthroat. These traits are part of his campaign to achieve symbolically what he can't quite carry off ideologically, by competing with Bush for the most potent compliment in American politics today: You the man!

A specter is haunting the White House. It is the specter of the young Clint Eastwood. Check him out in those Reagan-era bad-cop films and you'll see the origin of Bush's flinty glare. This President owes his mandate, such as it is, to his projection of macho. There's a reason why he's the first President in history to inspire an action-hero doll. (Decked out in a flight suit, he's ready to enchant 8-year-olds of all ages.) From Bush's taunting response to insurgents in Iraq--"Bring 'em on"--to the fighter-pilot drag he donned for that famous aircraft-carrier landing, he rarely misses a chance to wave his whopper, and not just figuratively. That flight suit had a distinctly bulbous crotch. It's no reach to think that Bush's handlers, so concerned about lighting and posing him, would pad his panache. That sort of gesture goes straight to the subconscious, an achievement any hidden persuader can be proud of.

Still, something about the President's swagger lends itself to parody. It looks as forced and fragile as it is. Molly Ivins, an acute student of Bush's persona, says it combines three strands of Texas culture: "religiosity, anti-intellectualism, and machismo. The machismo is what I think is fake." If conditions grow grim, the doubts about his masculinity that have haunted Bush throughout his political life will reappear. One reason Dean smells blood in Iraq is that a quagmire there will resonate with what Texans used to say about Dubya: "All hat and no cattle." In the macho imagination, nothing is worse than a belligerent claim that can't be supported. This is why the slogan of Bush's warship visitation--"Mission Accomplished"--is a potential liability for him and a gift to Dean.

Can a Democrat be an alpha male? The question hasn't come up on CNN, but it may be the hidden issue of the campaign. After decades of associating Democrats with failed masculinity, the Republicans are faced with an opponent who knows how to put on a butch display. They are trying to get around Dean's fight-back persona by portraying him as a dyspeptic, impetuous fool. Whether this negative spin will stick remains to be seen, but there's another a-word that pops up regularly in pieces about Dean: anger. The Republicans and their allies are trying to undercut his brashness by calling him reckless. Still, fist-waving hasn't exactly hurt Donald Rumsfeld. Ever since 9/11, nothing seems to be over the top when it comes to macho in a pol. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger. His meteoric rise--despite a record of groping and degrading women--is ample proof that in American politics today Liberace's motto applies: "Too much is not enough!"

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