Every age has its own preferred terms of political emasculation. Teddy Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson a white-handy Miss Nancy. Adlai Stevenson was dubbed Adelaide. Michael Dukakis was called a pansy, George H.W. Bush a wimp and John Kerry in a subtle feat of gendered rhetoric an effete flip-flopper who looks French. Its not just individual politicians who are painted as deficient in their manhood, either. Ideas and coalitions get the same treatment: Irving Kristol observed in the 1990s that the American welfare state has had a feminine coloration from the very beginning; Orrin Hatch once called the Democrats the party of homosexuals.