Terminator or girlie man?

New Hampshire

Everyone wants to know what the key demographic will be in this election. In 1996, it was ‘soccer moms’; in 1994, ‘angry white men’. For Campaign ’04, the columnist Michelle Malkin has been touting the concept of ‘security moms’ — gun-owning women whom 9/11 shook out of their Gen-X stupor.

I’d say ‘security moms’ — or ‘bellicose women’, as Prof Glenn Reynolds, America’s Instapundit, dubbed them — were certainly a factor and maybe a decisive one in Republican gains in the 2002 elections. But I wonder if there are quite so many of them two years on. And, in the absence of any alternative suggestions, it seems to me the key group in this election may be ‘girlie men’.

The term comes from a skit on NBC’s Saturday Night Live back in the Eighties, when Hans and Franz, two Schwarzeneggeresque weightlifters, used it to mock those bodybuilders whose bodies were insufficiently built. But the real Arnold dusted it off the other day, making an appearance at a shopping mall in Ontario, California with the talk-radio maestro Hugh Hewitt (on whose rollicking show I have the honour to appear). Speaking of obstructionist Democrats at the state legislature in Sacramento, Governor Schwarzenegger said, ‘If they don’t have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, “I don’t want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers, and I want them to make the millions of dollars”, if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men.’ The crowd roared its approval, and Arnold added, to further cheers, ‘If these guys won’t do the job, I’m going to announce each of you a terminator.’

Up in Sacramento, they weren’t happy. The governor’s remark was ‘as misogynist as it is anti-gay,’ complained Mark Leno, a San Francisco assemblyman and chairman of the legislature’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Caucus.