From Rich Lowry …

Pajama Boy’s place in Internet infamy was secured as soon as the insufferable man-child was tweeted out by Organizing for America.

He is the face of a Web ad that is the latest effort by the Obama team to leverage the holidays for conversation about Obamacare. “Wear pajamas,” the ad reads. “Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”

And, sure enough, Pajama Boy is wearing pajamas — a zip-up onesie in classic Lamar Alexander plaid — and drinking hot chocolate. He is in his 20s, sporting hipster glasses he could have bought at Warby Parker and an expression of self-satisfied ironic amusement.

Pajama Boy is about as threatening as Michael Cera and so nerdy he could guest-host on an unwatched MSNBC show. He is probably reading The Bell Jar and looking forward to a hearty Christmas meal of stuffed tofurkey. If he has anything to say about it, Obamacare enrollments will spike in the next few weeks in Williamsburg and Ann Arbor. …

But it’s hard not to see Pajama Boy as an expression of the Obama vision, just like his forebear Julia, the Internet cartoon from the 2012 campaign. Pajama Boy is Julia’s little brother. She progressed through life without any significant family or community connections. He is the picture of perpetual adolescence. Neither is a symbol of self-reliant, responsible adulthood.

And so both are ideal consumers of government. Julia needed the help of Obama-supported programs at every juncture of her life, and Pajama Boy is going to get his health insurance through Obamacare (another image shows him looking very pleased in a Christmas sweater, together with the words “And a happy New Year with health insurance”).

The breakdown of marriage and its drift into the 30s mean there are more Julias and Pajama Boys than ever. The growth of government feeds off this trend and, at the margins, augments it. The vision of the Obama Democrats, distilled to its essence, is of a direct relationship between the state and the individual without the mediating institutions of family, church, and community that are an inherent check on government power. …

Never has the difference between what Chris Matthews memorably dubbed the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party been so stark. Pajama Boy’s mom probably still tucks him in at night, and when she isn’t there for him, Obamacare will be. A less nurturing reaction is, as New Jersey governor Chris Christie put it in a counter tweet, “Get out of your pajamas.” There’s a reason President Barack Obama is underwater by a 2-to-1 margin among men in the latest Quinnipiac poll.

For all the ridicule directed at Julia during last year’s campaign, she got at something important: Single women do look to government as a cushion against their economic insecurities. Pajama Boy isn’t so apt. He might be glad to pay more for his health insurance to include maternity benefits he doesn’t need as a blow against gender stereotyping, but most young people will presumably consider Obamacare more rationally and realize it’s a scheme to get them to subsidize insurance costs for older people.

… and Jonah Goldberg …

By the time this “news” letter reaches your e-mail box, pretty much every joke imaginable about “Pajama Boy” will have been made. But I reject such a dour Malthusian view of Pajama Boy humor! …

Pajama Boy doesn’t exude homosexuality; he gives off the anodyne scent of emasculation. Seriously, the construction worker from the Village People would kick his ass. Besides, this is the gay enrollment ad for Obamacare (there’s also this). All of these dudes are manlier than Pajama Boy.

If you try to play out the life of Pajama Boy in your mind, he probably has a girlfriend. It’s just that she’s wearing the pants in the relationship, as they used to say. I picture her like Sarah Silverman in School of Rock or the girlfriend at the beginning of Office Space who everyone knows is cheating on Peter.

Pajama Boy is a Low-T liberal who wears a “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt and flinches whenever his girlfriend makes a sudden movement. He’s the sort of guy who thinks the “Consensual Sex Contract” given to him by his liberal-arts college R.A. is a good place to start, but ultimately doesn’t go far enough. Charlie Cooke compares him to Leonard from Big Bang Theory, but I think he’s more like Raj, who “manscapes” (and moisturizes!) and is ecstatic when he’s invited to girls’ night. I imagine he was terribly conflicted when his girlfriend finally made him watch The Silence of the Lambs (he wanted to rent Pitch Perfect again), because while he was horrified by all of the violence and he was dutifully empowered by the Clarice Starling character, he was secretly thrilled by the idea of having his own human-flesh girl suit.

First, it’s worth stating this isn’t about Ethan Krupp, the Obamacare activist who plays Pajama Boy. For all I know he bow-hunts alligators and rides a Harley. Though, come on, it’s doubtful. The point is that the Obama social-media folks, for whom Krupp works, are going for an image, so what Krupp is like in real life is irrelevant and people should probably leave the guy alone.

There’s a debate over why on earth the promoters of Obamacare would pick this image to hawk their wares. One side says that it was a brilliantly cynical move because it got people talking just like those “Brosurance” ads with the keg-stands got people talking. (The motto of the campaign is, after all, “Get Talking.”) If you can make young people chatter about Obamacare, goes the theory, more will eventually sign up. The other side of the argument is that this offers a real peak into the collective mind of liberalism (and the collective incompetence of the Obamacare team). Pajama Boy represents an actual constituency. There are males (if not necessarily “men”) who fit this profile.

Like most people who’ve thought it through, I’m more inclined to the latter. The Pajama Boy image is an extension of the original Thanksgiving enrollment video, which featured parents saying, “We love you no matter what, but it’s time to get covered.” Which isn’t quite as weird as saying “We are admirals of the pantless armada, give us your ball-bearing vestibules,” but still strange. The “we love you no matter what” line — like the “get talking” line — is an attempt to make getting insurance both edgy and mature at the same time. Edgy because there’s a vague hint that talking about this stuff violates a taboo or is difficult. Mature because it’s something grown-ups do.

But there are problems. For starters, Obamacare actually delays adulthood. You get to stay on your parents’ plan until you’re 26! Which means the young people we’re talking about are 27-year-olds! Twenty-seven used to be the age of seriously grown men. John Wayne was 27 in the Lucky Texan. You can go to college, enlist in the army, do a couple tours, and come home again before the age of 27. The average age of marriage for men is 28. (Though the women I’ve talked to think dudes who have difficult talks in their jammie onesies while drinking hot cocoa might have to wait a good deal longer. Seriously if women had Terminator-like vision that saw the world by sexual attraction instead of infrared, Pajama Boy would be an almost invisible boy-shaped vapor.)

Moreover, isn’t it interesting to see the contempt Gen-X and Baby Boomer liberals have for Millennials, or at least Millennial men? (By the way, where are the ads targeting young women?) Twenty-something males are either testosterone-addled idiots doing keg-stands or they’re suffering from estrogen poisoning.

Last, I love the rearguard effort from liberals trying to turn the mockery of Pajama Boy into proof of right-wing sexual insecurity. It seems to me this is a pretty desperate attempt by the MSNBC fanboy set to compensate for the fact that so many people find Pajama Boy pathetic. That cuts too close to home. So it must be more proof of racism or gender confusion. But if you just take a step back, you can see the problem. If you find yourself in the position of arguing that real men get snuggly in their jammies and drink cocoa, you need to push the keyboard away and walk around the block a bit.

… we get Kevin D. Williamson:

The president’s low standing among the Y-chromosome set, dramatic though it is, is not entirely surprising. He couldn’t close the deal with them the first time around, he presided over an ugly recession in which men were particularly hard hit, and then he presided over a sickly recovery in which unemployment remains elevated and is significantly higher for men than for women. And the labor-force participation rate, in many ways a better measure of employment, has plunged during the Obama years. Forgot the bicycle helmet, the mom jeans, the wife scolding us about eating our veggies, the fact that he throws a baseball like he should be relaxing with a mug of cocoa in his footie pajamas — President Obama loses points for style, to be sure, but he has a substance problem too. …

The experience of joblessness is, I think, particularly despair-inducing for men. It isn’t that unemployment is not stressful for women as well — it surely is, especially for women who bear the burden of economic responsibility for their households. But there is entangled in that issue something more than simple financial well-being for men. To be a provider, for oneself and one’s family, to do something useful and to earn, is deeply connected to many men’s sense of self-respect, to their identity as men. A second strong correlating factor in men’s suicide rates is being single, which is itself linked to the question of employment. With weak economic conditions persisting, suicide rates have been rising.

For those men who have experienced extended unemployment, the memory is often a vivid and painful one. And even those who haven’t can detect the scent of economic fear in the air. Suicide is an extreme reaction, of course, but you don’t have to be an economic weatherman to know which way the financial winds are blowing. Women experiencing economic vulnerability tend toward welfare-statism, with SNAP and Medicaid and all of the rest of it acting in loco mariti. Men experiencing economic vulnerability, or who have reason to think they may experience it in the future, seem to move in the opposite direction: President Obama lost white men without college degrees by 31 points last time around.

It may be the case that men see Barack Obama as a kind of romantic competitor — not the man himself, but the vision of government he stands for. The more the state steps into the role of provider, the less men have to offer in that capacity. This is especially true of men with modest earnings potential. I doubt that very many of those non-college-educated, working-class white men follow the careers of Hanna Rosin or Maureen Dowd, but the message — “men are obsolete” — infiltrates the culture at large. President Obama is the messenger, and an agent of the Rosin-Dowd worldview: His vision of the good life is universal kindergarten and universal graduate school, a coddling welfare state, etc., and a gimlet eye cast upon much of what used to be thought of as man’s work: drilling for gas, timbering, mining. President Obama is first and foremost the public face of his own agenda and his own economic record, which is a poor one. But he is also the face of something else, an unbrave new world with little use for men whose Christmas plans do not involve buttonholing family members for precious and grim-mouthed homilies about Obamacare.

American men have been losing ground since 1973, the year their real wages peaked. Strong economic growth from the Reagan years to the turn of the century, along with strong economic mobility and a general national sense of optimism, helped soften that blow, as did rising household incomes as more women entered the work force. But our once-dynamic economy has grown sclerotic, and economic mobility has declined — and that wasn’t supposed to happen. President Obama represents what admirers such as Michael Grunwald have called a “New New Deal.” American men don’t seem to think it is a very good deal at all.