Maureen Dowd is worried that Barack Obama’s “impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign—the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.” This is a bum rap for Team Obama—they were the ones trying to suggest Obama was less effete, on Iraq for example. It’s Obama who’s been touting his childhood abroad and his Kenyan grandmother as evidence of his foreign policy credentials. Others in the media are fretting about his “toughness” as well.

So we may have reached the perfect gender dilemma: is Obama “man enough” to be President? That, really, is the question Clinton is raising in her own way. “Experience” is a dodge, a subterfuge for the real issue: the ability to face down both America’s enemies and John McCain in November.

Clinton has spent her Senate career developing a response to concerns about a woman’s ability to be commander-in-chief. She joined the Senate Armed Services Committee and voted in favor of the Iraq War, believing she would avoid the dilemma which faced Democrats who voted against the first Iraq war. And despite her feints and attempts to impress the liberal base with her willingness to withdraw troops from Iraq, she cannot shake her reputation for being something of a hawk. (She voted in favor of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment identifying the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, for example.)

Now it is Obama’s turn to prove he can stand up to Clinton and McCain, to say nothing of real bad guys like Fidel Castro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In this regard, his excessive deference to personal engagement (Deborah Tannen has something to say about that) as a tool of foreign policy and his cool, aloof demeanor work against him. Can he take a punch or throw one? Does he really understand that as President he’ll face enemies utterly immune to reason, enemies beyond the conciliatory powers of even the best community organizer? Maureen Dowd and the rest of Obama’s media fans are waiting with bated breath for the answer.