“The Testosterone Crowd”???

I bet you’re wondering who is this “testosterone crowd”? A bunch of bikers? Weekend warriors playing war games in the woods? Navy Seals or Navy Seal wannabes? A pack of drunk teenage boys on the prowl?

Nope. According to an article in today’s “Week in Review” in the New York Times, it is … all white males.

The article contains a good deal of advice to John Kerry about how to appeal to this relatively important if benighted demographic (Gore got 36% of their vote in 2000; Bush got 60%). In the future maybe we will be graced with an analogous article on how Republicans can appeal to the “progesterone crowd.”

Some of Kerry’s advisors have discovered grounds for hope. Donna Brazile, for example, Gore’s campaign manager and well known expert on white men, points out that “[w]hite males, especially working class males, care about their jobs, and they care about things like health care.”

That’s certainly reassuring, but Brazile is obviously worried that Kerry is trying too hard to appeal to these “white males,” whom she clearly regards as very far out of the mainstream. Indeed, she said, “[t]he only thing he hasn’t done is sit down with a six-pack and chew tobacco with them.”

Hmm. Here’s some more advice: in an inexpensive but sincere effort to demonstrate how tolerant and inclusive and welcoming and truly multicultural the Democrats are, perhaps Kerry should arrange for spittoons to be distributed (liberally, of course) around the floor of the Democratic convention. Maybe he could even prevail upon local authorities (Mayor Bloomberg, after all, used to be a Democrat) to suspend enforcement of the ordinance against spitting in public for the duration of the convention.