Kamala’s Manly Messaging

The Harris-Walz campaign and its surrogates have been targeting dudes, hammering home the message that voting for Kamala doesn’t make you any less of a man. (Fast Company)

Barack Obama: The former president sparked controversy last week when he observed that a lack of enthusiasm for Harris in the black community seemed “to be more pronounced with the brothers.”

• “Part of it makes me think — and I'm speaking to men directly — that, well, you just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president,” he said at a campaign event in Pittsburgh.

Tim Walz: In what was widely seen as an attempt to play up the Minnesota governor’s manly image, Walz participated in a pheasant hunt over the weekend, but appeared to struggle loading his Beretta A400 semiautomatic shotgun, and did not manage to ever actually fire the weapon.

• To be fair, it’s possible Walz was having an off day, as he was crowned the best shot among Democrats at a congressional shooting competition in 2015.

Creatives for Harris: A pro-Kamala “grassroots collective of ad execs, TV writers, and comedians” released an ad last week featuring actors playing traditionally masculine men who are “man enough” to support the vice president.

• One of the supposed Harris supporters, a well-muscled man sitting on a weightlifting bench, declares he’s “man enough to deadlift 500 and braid the sh-t out of my daughter’s hair.”

• The ad’s creator, Jacob Reed, told Fast Company: “It almost feels like Trump and JD Vance and all the MAGA-world people are afraid of women. … Like, there’s this subtext that if you’re trying to control women this much, there’s something about your masculinity that must feel challenged.”

• Watch it here.

Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon’s blistering assessment of the Creatives for Harris ad:

Bubba’s Two Cents

The labor force participation rate of prime-age American men has steadily declined for decades and is now at a record-low. With life expectancy increasingly favoring those who have graduated college, young men are now 10% less likely than women to earn a bachelor’s degree. American men’s suicide rates are four times higher than those of women. But, yeah, let’s send out some guy in a sports jersey to call you a sexist - that’ll really win dudes over.