Kathleen Parker, Eliot Spitzer’s co-host for CNN’s much-anticipated Not Crossfire show, has a Washington Post column out today with the easily-overlooked headline: “Obama: Our First Female President.”
Parker — female, after all — is a little less cocksure in the piece itself, writing that Obama “may be our first woman president.” Parker’s diagnosis: Obama suffers from “rhetorical-testosterone deficit” disorder (RTDD?). Or rather, he “may be suffering” from it. Symptoms apparently include “chatterbox”ing, “deferring,” “weighing,” “considering,” and using the passive voice. (How might Parker diagnose her CNN co-host? I’d tune in to see that.)
The New York Times‘s Maureen Dowd, asked about Parker’s column by George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America this morning, took the opportunity to fault the president for what she calls his “anthropologist side of waiting and looking,” which, she said, is “not really a male or female trait.” Dowd doesn’t “think [Obama’s] main problem is a gender one” (Wha? Maybe I’ve buried the lede here?), identifying it instead as a “humanoid one.”
Obama: Our First Humanoid President.
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.