A new ad on behalf of Kamala Harris called "Man Enough" was released Friday, and it's easily the most cringe-worthy you'll ever see. It just might win the election for Donald Trump.
"I'm a man," says a white man in a cowboy hat. "I'm a man," says a black guy lifting weights. "I'm a man," says the caricature of a bearded motorcycle club guy, and so on. As several more "masculine"-looking guys claim to be "a man," you get the feeling there's a punchline coming.
There isn't. The stand-ins for real men are all actors, and they are all unintentionally funny representations of what liberals think "men" are.
Written and directed by Jimmy Kimmel writer and "Jacob All Trades" Substack contributor Jacob Reed, the ad—which was "not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee—tells us that real men like strong women and will vote for Harris.
"I'm man enough to eat my steak rare," says a guy in a pickup truck. “I’m man enough to be emotional in front of my wife,” says another guy who could be mistaken for a Chippendales dancer.
Most insulting of all is the actors looking into the camera and proclaiming they're "not afraid of women." This was the primary reason given for Hillary Clinton's defeat, and the left just can't shake the fact that men don't give a crap what gender a candidate is. It's what they believe that's the problem.
The use of profanity in the ad is also cringey. I'm “man enough to deadlift 500 [pounds] and braid the s*** out of my daughter’s hair," says the weightlifter. It's as if all left-wing nightmares about male Trump supporters have come true, and men are walking the streets hunting leftists.
If Reed really wanted to redefine “what it means to be a man” in a way that had a chance of reaching outside his circle, he wouldn’t dress these guys in the gender equivalent of blackface to recite lines like “I’m man enough to be emotional in front of my wife,” and “Have all the cats you want!” Instead, he’d get a bunch of actual Harris-supporting men, have them dress as they normally would (with or without smart glasses or man-buns), and say the same things, minus the sardonic convulsions. Be who you are and say what you mean, [and] you might win some people over.
Instead, he hired actors to pose in front of fields and pickups to thump chests about benching and bourbon, only to shift and proclaim in Hee Haw voices that they cry at West Side Story and “love women who support their families” (but also women who decide not have families! Whatever you want! It’s fine!). One by one, the actors recite, almost in homage to Stanley Kubrick’s I’m Spartacus! scene, “I love women!” But they’re all still wearing their ironic Village People costumes and hamming the delivery, so you don’t believe any of them. It’s camp without libido, which I didn’t think was possible.
The most unintentionally funny segment was the older motorcycle guy saying, "You want to be a childless cat lady? Have all the cats you want." The incongruity of the motorcycle guy "wearing a shirt whose sleeves have been chopped off either with a fork or by an ex-Project Runway contestant inspired by The Flintstones," as Taibbi writes, talking about childless cat ladies is giggle-worthy and very, very, strange.
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Ultimately, the entire Harris ad campaign to attract men is one of the most bizarre efforts I can remember seeing in 50 years of reporting on politics.
They dragged Barack Obama out to give a speech to “the brothers” (I covered two Obama elections and he was never anything but phobic about that kind of language) while sending Tim Walz on a “man-focused media blitz” meant to involve walking with Michael Strahan on a football field as well as “pheasant hunting with social media influencers.” Walz nearly blew his balls off on the pheasant hunt and Good Morning America seems to have balked on the field shot, so it’s hard to avoid reading “I’m a Man” as anything but another messaging fumble. Even if it’s part intentional in-joke, there’s no way they’ve properly calculated how this goes over.
Clowning the stereotypical male for not “supporting women” will go down like the proverbial vomit smoothie with the masses of “unreimagined” men who do love and support the women in their lives. Equating failure to support Harris with being “afraid of women” also won’t go over well, but at least that’s part of a toxicity charge that isn’t new. If this is the “reimagined” gender model, are there even women who want in?
Most women I know wouldn't run away from "men" like this. They'd kick them in the crotch and tell them to "man up." "Toxic masculinity" is a myth perpetrated to make men feel embarrassed about who they are.
I hope both men and women remember that when they vote.
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