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.