Today Americans have Electile Dysfunction.

A woman can be elected President of the United States as long as she is perceived by the electorate of having bigger cojones than her rival candidates.

Hillary Clinton, for instance, won the New York Senate seat because the voters could see she obviously had more cojones than her rival, Republican Rick Lazio. That she had more personal baggage of a negative nature wasn’t as important as how she handled that load. Her election would have been a wrestling match, with more hand-to-hand fighting, had New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani been able to stay in the race. But he had to quit -- because of prostrate and marital problems.

Consider that Americans never “saw” Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a cripple in a wheelchair. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” was a paen to cojones and to resolute self-control, which is the flip side to having the biggest cojones. The man in the wheelchair was even alleged to have had an affair! Lyndon Johnson said of him, “He was the one person I ever knew, anywhere, who was never afraid.” Roosevelt’s jaunty cigarette grin may have hid excruciating pain, but he carried himself as erect as a --

The American Public knew Harry S. Truman had more cojones than Thomas Dewey. True, he brought a straight-and-narrow Midwestern morality to the White House, but he also joked once that, “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician, and to tell the truth, there’s hardly a difference.” The Man from Missouri may have been an accidental President, but he dropped the Bomb -- twice! -- and the placard on his desk said, “The Buck Stops Here.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower was commander of the Allied Forces during World War II. When we consider that every successful Presidential candidate between FDR and Bill Clinton served in the Armed Forces, we should not be surprised that the highest ranking officer who served during our greatest military struggle should have become President afterwards. But Ike was not just another Ulysses S. Grant. “Truman’s War” in Korea became “Ike’s Peace.” Part of the way Eisenhower kept the peace during those heady Cold War days came by keeping “the military-industrial complex” (his own phrase) on a leash. That takes cojones.

John F. Kennedy was the sexiest Presidential candidate ever in American political history. He reeked of cojones. In the famous debates John F. Kennedy won the Presidency as much as that “gut-fighter,” that “hawk” Richard Nixon lost it because JFK was cool under pressure while Nixon sweated up a storm. Once in office JFK went eye to eye with Krushchev and the Russians in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the world wondered if cojones would be the death of us. But Kennedy not only steered us through that crisis, but he also took full responsibility for the CIA-created excesses of the Bay of Pigs. (We see now how the Bay of Pigs could never have happened during Eisenhower’s watch. Nixon himself said that Kennedy had two principal political liabilities. “One was only apparent -- his Catholicism; the other was real -- his lack of experience.”) Some pundits suggest that if America knew that JFK had been schtupping Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio’s ex-wife Marilyn Monroe (among others), JFK might have breezed through re-election.

Lyndon Johnson was another accidental president. The 1964 presidential race between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater might have been closer had not Goldwater thundered at the Republican National Convention, ”Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice!” Having the biggest cojones is one thing; coming off like a lunatic zealot was another. The TV commercial that began with the little girl pulling the petals off a daffodil and ended with a nuclear bomb made the point: Self-control is part and parcel of Cojones. Still, Johnson always resented his predecessor’s womanizing. “Why, I had more women by accident than he ever had on purpose!”

In 1968 Richard Nixon, a man who most often seemed to wrestling with sexual repression, came back from his years in the political desert with renewed libidinous vigor to do battle against . . . the Happy Warrior Hubert H. Humphrey. Because Humphrey didn’t look like he could spell “machismo” and because that alpha male Bobby Kennedy was dead, Nixon had a clear field. As far as the public could see, Nixon appeared to have overcome -- or was at least in control of -- all his perceived cojone problems.

Nixon offered his secret plan to end the Vietnam War -- which as the pundits pointed out, was four more years of war. He won in 1968 by the narrowest margins, but won in 1972 against that “extremist,” “that peace candidate” George McGovern. Nixon’s own paranoia brought on Watergate. Using obvious sexual imagery, he told David Frost in 1977, “I brought myself down. I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in. And they twisted it with relish.” Should we be surprised that a new book alleges Nixon was a wife-beater?

Gerald Ford became President when Nixon resigned. His honeymoon with the American public ended with his pardon of Richard Nixon. When asked about a pardon during his vice-presidential confirmation hearing, Ford said, “I do not think the public would stand for it.” He stumbled elsewhere, too, and not just in his plan “to whip inflation.” When he ran against Jimmy Carter in 1976, he declared at their debate that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

The peanut farmer from Georgia Jimmy Carter won the election. That he was described constantly as a peanut farmer instead of a former commander of a nuclear submarine points to a oftimes perceived “cojones deficiency.” Still, he told Playboy magazine that he had “lusted in his heart” for women. From a born-again Baptist, the appearance of cojones made America breathe freely. Most obviously the cojone problem popped up in his famous 1979 “malaise” speech, which sounded like the country was having a hard time getting it up to do its business. Then, too, Carter appeared powerless -- a devastating cojones-deficit -- in the 444 day Iranian hostage situation.

Ronald Reagan was a former movie star. He made war movies as a member of the Armed Forces, where he showed his battle courage -- his cojones -- on a Hollywood sound stage. He described himself as “the Errol Flynn of B movies,” which is a very curiously libidinous comparison to make. His famous retort to Carter in the debates, “There you go again,” was a flippant response to a comment no one seems to remember nowadays. But flippant cojones were what the Gipper excelled at. He won two elections in a row and left office with a 70 percent approval rating. Scholars still wrestle with the enigma of Reagan. The American Public knew better: Cojones make the Man.

George Bush, who succeeded him, should have had a better Presidency. He had an astonishing 89 percent approval rating at the end of Desert Storm. His most colossal mistake in the eyes of the American public was not finishing the job that Desert Storm started. A fighter pilot in World War II, Bush found himself saddled with “the Wimp Factor,” which disparages the cojones factor.

Bill Clinton came to office as the first President since Roosevelt who had never served in the Armed Forces. It didn’t matter how charismatic a politician he was. His cojones were never tested on the field of battle. True, there were all those half-heard stories about him and young women and Arkansas state troopers. What really galled his political enemies was that in his first act as President, Clinton created the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy about homosexuals in the military. If there ever was a threat to a straight man’s cojones, Bill Clinton was it.

Clinton ran against Bob Dole in 1996. What has Dole done since losing the election? He’s been doing commercials about Erectile Dysfunction. His wife Elizabeth Dole went “thumbs up” when Dole admitted he was using Viagra.

Clinton was impeached because he had oral sex in the Oval Office. And yet his attackers -- known as “the Puritan wing” of Congress -- lost the battle. Clinton had the bigger cojones. As it stands today, nobody disputes the fact that Clinton could be re-elected to a third term, if the Constitution permitted it.

Instead, the American public had George W. Bush and Al Gore running a dead-heat in the last moments of the campaign. Dubya was said to be “a guy’s guy,” the kind “you could have a beer with,” charming in a fraternity boy sort of way, if not crackling with wit and intellect. Gore is said to be “wooden,” “arrogant,” prone to exaggeration, a man of the issues. Still there was that Kiss at the Democratic National Convention.

Was it that Kiss what won Gore the Popular Vote?

Was the body count at Huntsville’s Death Row what won the Electoral College vote for Bush?

But still we have no President.

America is stricken with Electile Dysfunction.

Arghhhh!

Also by Frederick Zackel:

• My God is better than Your God
• George W.: Like Father, Like Son?
• The Third Millennium Will Be Underwhelming!