Via all sorts of sources on the left, right-wing propagandist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post correctly (correctly for a propagandist anyway) disregards reality and history in her possibly-successful attempt to frame President Obama as “feminine.”

Obama: Our first female president

If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.

She said it here.

Parker’s pretty good at wielding feminist and gender-study language and theory

We’ve come a long way gender-wise. Not so long ago, women would be censured for speaking or writing in public. But cultural expectations are stickier and sludgier than oil. Our enlightened human selves may want to eliminate gender norms, but our lizard brains have a different agenda.

Women, inarguably, still are punished for failing to adhere to gender norms by acting “too masculine” or “not feminine enough.” In her fascinating study about “Hating Hillary,” Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, “like a man.”

M’kay, nothing you wouldn’t hear in a 1st-year gender-studies paper, and also perfectly true. Not too surprising either since Karlyn Kors Campbell was a pioneering women’s-studies professor who focused on the rhetoric and reception of women speakers in American political history. She’s also the part-namesake of an academic prize in Rhetorical Criticism. So good call on Parker’s part!

Of course as with all good propaganda she uses two paragraphs to cite credible people and accurate statements in order to make you less-critically receptive to the first sentence in the sentence that follows. Which would be

Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse?

Well, nice try but no, Obama is almost archetypically male of a type well-understood, admired, and often feared by socially or hierarchically subordinate men. See “father, remote.” See also the myriad leaders among aviation engineers, software developers, biotech researchers, research university employees, merchant transoceanic shippers, bureaucrats and technocrats, career-military, and industrial-scale, export-oriented commodity-crop farmers for examples.

The reasonable-sounding way Parker sets up her assertion, though, you could almost agree that his distant-father routine might… somehow… um… be feminine. Incredible reframing if she could pull it off, yes. Maybe she’s bucking for an award in rhetoric herself.

You wanna know how much of a stretch this is, by the way? Karlyn Kors Campbell didn’t just study women’s political speech, she’s also written about male Presidential rhetoric. And possibly since Campbell is still alive, Parker acknowledges a… slight problem with her attempted spin

Campbell’s research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my own theory. She insists that men are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy — clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and preempting opposing positions.

Ooh, that’s gotta hurt your thesis! Barack Obama’s “feminine” just like… um… Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton? Oh yeah, that’s going to get you an award, but only if you can make that one stick. In the next paragraph Parker wisely relies on the rhetoric of uncertainty to express confidence.

I’m not so sure. The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell’s argument that “nothing prevents” men from appropriating women’s style without negative consequences.

Yeah, masculine-coded contexts that evidently weren’t in place in those crisis-free, no-need-for-decisive-action years when Reagan was President (1980-1988) or when Clinton was (1992-2000) but magically are today. Oh, and speaking of crises that demand decisive action, how ‘bout My Pet Goat boy from 2001-2008?

But suddenly Parker’s saying President Obama somehow will finally be the guy who finally gets hit with the consequences? Of being to “womanly” as opposed to, say, too male-professor/remote-father-figure aloof?

Give her credit for trying. And give her credit, as well, for her women’s studies bone fides… which, incidentally, I think really are bone fides!

Parker’s pretty clear throughout her piece that while she’s criticizing Obama for… well… obviously like a lot of her peers she’s just throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks… but while she’s critical of Obama’s “femininity” she doesn’t actually see anything wrong at all with “womanly” leadership styles or, indeed, women leaders!

Indeed, negative reaction to Obama’s speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman’s turn.

She’s not talking about Hillary Clinton. But only because Clinton is a Democrat, not because she’s a woman. She’ll support, campaign for, and might would outright prefer, a Sarah Palin to a Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney for President, and prefer a Nikki Haley to a Haley Barbour for Vice President.

Don’t underestimate the significance of this.

The patriarchy is alive and well, and women like Parker, Palin, Haley, Bachmann, Angle, and others are utterly committed to its maintenance. But this is not your father’s patriarchy!

Update: Oh cool, and professor Mark Lieberman of Language Log has a technical takedown of Parker’s factual assertions about “feminine” vs. “masculine” language usage at Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations