Who's more awesome? Journalists weigh in--unfortunately

The constant personality analysis, comparison, the stream of adjectives: insecure, nurturing, cocky, graceful, self-deprecating, presidential, vulnerable, feminine, masculine, bellicose, glamorous.....

Is anyone else getting tired of journalists' amateur attempts at psychoanalysis? Not just of the candidates, but us and our responses to them?

Even a huge O-fan like me is getting worried about the frequency of references to how he's making politics "cool." Google two words: "Obama" and "awesomeness." The number of results, I fear, actually lends credence to the (false) argument that he is all hype, no ability to govern. I cringe every time someone playfully writes that his rallies are like raves, girls are fainting, yada yada yada.

To put it another way, writers everywhere are getting in touch with their inner Maureen Dowd.

Let's start with her. Here. And here. Columns called "Begrudging his Bedazzling," and "Quien es less Macho?" have produced this, by now tired, brand of insight:

• "Voters gravitate toward the presidential candidates who seem more comfortable in their skin. The fact that Obama is exceptionally easy in his skin has made Hillary almost jump out of hers."
• "Her sunshine-colored jackets on the trail hardly disguise the fact that she’s pea-green with envy." (And my newspaper is about to be pea green with puke.)
• "Just as in the White House, when her cascading images and hairstyles became dizzying and unsettling, suggesting that the first lady woke up every day struggling to create a persona..." (This stuff is when the misogynist word gets rolled out, leave her hair in the White House alone, even if it is an okay metaphor for your played-out point.)
• "Obama tapped into his inner chick and turned the other cheek."
• Re: Hillary's feistiness, Maureen encourages her to be more feminine, like Barack: "Less towel-snapping and more towel color coordinating, less steroids and more sensitivity."
• Re: Hillary's spending at Dunkin Doughnuts: "But total domination in the snack arena does not cut the mustard."
• "By threatening to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, the Clinton campaign simply confirmed the fact that they might be going down the drain."

It's the word play that kills me. Word play, forced alliteration, mixed metaphors masquerading as insight... I imagine Maureen sitting at her adorable lap top, sexy legs crossed, skim latte within reach, being like, oh! Here I work two sink metaphors into one sentence and...does Brad think I'm smart-funny-threatening or just smart-funny? And the rest of us are stuck with her fucking sink metaphor like, if you uprooted the kitchen sink and threw it across the room, then there's no drain to... never mind.

Another Times columnist Gail Collins can't seem to find anything to offer us except more Hillary pseudo-psychobabble. From yesterday's Hillary, Buckeye Girl:

• "If Hillary Clinton were a state, she’d be Ohio."
• "She has managed to become the boring candidate in this primary. This is one of the great anti-glamour stories in history."
• "If Hillary can win this one — and if she doesn’t, she is as cooked as reheated risotto — it will be because people here worry that Barack Obama is getting show-offy."
• "Back around Debate 10 — lo those many debates ago — ... she was confident and presidential"
• "Now, he’s better than she is — calm and witty at crucial junctures."

A few weeks ago, even political razor Frank Rich devoted his column to a personality profile of JFK and pondered if the comparison is necessarily flattering. After the Wisconsin victory for Obama and McCain, Rich indulged in writing about who looks more like a loser, McCain or Clinton.

Same with Bob Herbert: "There’s a fine line between brash and cocky. You can’t embark on a quest as audacious as Mr. Obama’s without a certain brashness. But cocky turns people off. And the senator seemed at times to stray across that line." And this: "Pride, the nuns told me in grammar school, goeth before a fall."

Christopher Beam's political blog is Slate:

• "Because he’s loose on the stump, self-deprecating yet cocky, Obama gets away with appropriating the language of his own deification."
• He asked a voter why he's supporting Obama: "'Because I just saw him.' That seems to be the way it works for many young people: To see him is to be for him."
• "In other ways, Obama doesn’t act messianic—just cocky."

There's nothing wrong, per se, with pointing these things out, he's witty, more confident, but getting cocky; she still seems presidential but desperate to brand herself... okay, okay.

I was out to dinner with a group last night, and we got into a fun conversation about the something called the enneagram, a Jungian-like outline of the main personality types. It's a way of thinking about people in terms of their personality's pitfalls and strengths. What's annoying me is that much political analysis is framing election results as the by-product of personality nuance--the candidates' and our own. We want more or less glamor, more or less femininity, more or less ease in the candidate's own skin. What all those campaign workers campaigning their Obama-supporting asses off? What about people being legitimately weirded out by a forced "mandate," i.e. uncharted policy territory in the US health care history? What about Iraq votes, not releasing records, conditions of meeting with leaders and pulling out of NAFTA? Repulsion to dirty campaigning?

Can't his ascent and her decline in popularity be about something other than our need to be nurtured by a feminine leadership style (which, these writers love pointing out, he has and she does not)?

Everyone wants to offer his or her theory about how Hillary's hardness or Barack's grace has made the poll results somehow inevitable. But if he were losing, we'd be calling his "feminine moderation" spinelessness, and claiming Americans feel insecure and want a president who seems tough.

The personality-ergo-poll-results is, of course, only ushered out when the votes are counted, which makes the analysis all the less interesting. No one's actually risking making the wrong prediction based on our reaction to her tears and his Dick Cheney-cousin jokes. It makes reading political analysis kind of like reading a kid's paper about Oedipus' or Achilles' hubris. Like one thing in your personality cemented your destiny... of which you already know the outcome.

And even when the personality assessments are positive ("Obama is just so fricking awesome), I still worry about its effect on his campaign. Shallow praise of his awesomeness from serious journalists feeds Obama doubters more doubts. If I was on the fence, I'd be like, yeah so what's he gonna do as commander in chief, unleash his awesome arsenal of awesomeness and shake it out all over the desert till people put down their guns? Yeah, right.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with any of this. I'm just getting sick of it is all. It's made the most exciting race of my life boring to read about.