Susan Faludi

Sen. John Kerry on the campaign trail, 2004.

In the post-9/11 effort to restore Americans’ confidence in the country’s impregnability, national politics would become increasingly deranged. The demonstrations, as often as not, were comically absurd, as witness the deskbound officeholders of the 2004 presidential campaign out in the woods, felling flora and blasting fauna to prove their virile bona fides. But the needs these staged exertions in the wild addressed ran deep in the American past, far deeper than the superhero fantasies we constructed around our leaders. The attack on home soil triggered a search for a guardian of the homestead, a manly man, to be sure, but one particularly suited to protecting and providing for the isolated American family in perilous situations. He was less Batman than Daniel Boone, a frontiersman whose proofs of eligibility were the hatchet and the gun—and a bloody willingness to wield them.

As soon as hunting season opened, a camo-coveralled Kerry could be found in one frost­laden duck blind after another. Bleary­eyed journalists rose before dawn to follow him. There was the pheasant hunt in Iowa (where Kerry inspected the neck of his fresh kill before a phalanx of photographers), the goose hunt in Ohio (where Kerry emerged from a cornfield with a hand “stained with goose blood” but empty of an actual carcass), and another clay pigeon hunt in Wisconsin (no blood, but the candidate reportedly plugged seventeen of his twenty­five marks). At a campaign appearance in West Virginia, Kerry hoisted a shotgun onstage and told an audience of miners that he’d like to go “gobble­huntin’.” In Pike County, Ohio, Kerry dropped in on the Buchanan Village Gun Shop to inquire, in freshly acquired twang, “Can I get me a hunting license here?” It was a moment that inspired a National Review columnist to invoke the sodomy scene in Deliverance: “What will Kerry say if he goes on the campaign trail into deepest Appalachia? ‘Squeal like a pig?’”