Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

The risk of calling so many things “dog whistles”.

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So many of you guys have been trying to associate so many (basically ANY) remarks by the GOP to racism and one of Obama’s primary water carriers on the Obama-network (AKA MSNBC). As I have been saying, when you cry wolf too many times, people won’t listen when the real wolf is sighted. Presidents always get grief for too many vacations at Camp David, playing golf… so could someone please tell me, without grinning and laughing, how a smack from Superstar Mark Rubio against Obama for golfing is a freaking racial code word? Are you guys just trying so hard to defend your man that ANYTHING will be trumpeted as a racial dog whistle.

Mathews, O’Donnell, Bashir, Maddow, Mr Ed, Weird Al Sharpton… ZERO credibility as journalists. I’d even give Chris Hayes a nod to say he’s in the tank, but he is somewhat reasonable.

MARTIN BASHIR: We have seen an early draft of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s forthcoming oration. Can I quote something from you? “For four years, Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems, he hasn’t been working to earn re-election. He has been working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour.” How about that?

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the — lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. They find every way they possibly can to –

BASHIR: Lawrence — don’t you think — don’t you think that what he’s really trying to do is to suggest that the president is not paying attention to the central issues that come with the responsibility he has? Is he really – Mitch McConnell really making a connection with Tiger Woods who, of course, has become infamous for chasing various cocktail waitresses around Las Vegas and so on?

O’DONNELL: Martin, there are many, many, many rhetorical choices you can make at any point in any speech to make whatever point up want to make. If he wanted to make the point that you just suggested and I think he does want to make that point, they had a menu of a minimum of ten different kinds of images that they could have raised. And I promise you, the speech writers went through, rejecting three or four before they land order that one. That’s the one they want for a very deliberate reason. That — there’s – these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.

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  2. …as is the basic claim that he golfs too much. I feel like I’ve heard less about Obama golfing than previous Presidents of either party doing likewise. I do think O’Donnell and Schultz overreact sometimes, but Maddow is the best actual journalist of the primetime lineup. I think MSNBC recognizes this too, which is why they make her anchor for events like convention and election night coverage.

  3. How about Schultz saying that when Romney said the world calls on an American to do great things, that was a shoutout to the Birthers. How warped is Schultz to even think that? The whole MSNBC crowd are baboons. Too bad Warren likes to conduct interviews on that network, yet avoids local talk shows right here at home.

  4. The 2008 election was a demonstration by America that a black man could be elected president with white votes. For America to be a truly post-racial society, we will have to be able to vote against Obama without being called racists.

  5. is too claim that calling people racist , is, well, racist. That’s aside from the old, tried-and-true accusation of over-sensitivity on the part of liberals.

    This is part of the GOP making fun of the whole dog whistle concept. What’s telling is that I don’t find anything about dog whistling and golf, except by right wing sources.

    So John, you’re falling into (or setting) two traps here: 1) lumping all of us in with Lawrence O’Donnell and Martin Bashir and MSNBC 2) you’re carrying water for the GOP attacking the whole dog whistle concept. Thanks, but no thanks.

    • I am lumping you in with your media leaders by pointing this out (please note how some BMGers are defending the comments). And I say “sorta” because any and every time I say “all you guys”… I don’t really mean ALL you guys. Don’t we have that assumption here that we don’t speak in absolute terms? (as when you say ALL Republicans are “x” and I could clearly show you some Republicans which are NOT “X”.

      Second, I am carrying the GOP water in that I don’t believe the dog-whistle charge is justified in nearly the number of cases that you guys comment on. This miss use of the term is an example. I do believe there is racism being used by the GOP (and the DEM) but again, not in all the cases you decry.

  6. Wikipedia:

    You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

  7. The risk that Republicans have accepted in their chronic need to indulge in racism is that those times when they aren’t being racist, they’re still suspect, anyway.

    Want to solve the problem? Stop being racist.

    • I will start with a few assumptions. First, that there exists resentment on the part of white middle- and working-class populations throughout the country. Second, that there exists racial hostility on the part of that same group toward non-whites. Third, that the former resentment, even if legitimate, is difficult to separate from the latter racial hostility. And fourth, that there has been a long-established political strategy to appeal to the resentment, legitimate or not, with a wink to the racial hostility. And fifth, that this political strategy has been used by Republicans to make the Old South into a Solid South once again.

      Given these things, Democrats don’t give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they shouldn’t have to. But in reality, Democrats defeat themselves when they denounce something as silly as the golf thing as “dog whistle” and “racist” because the next time people hear a denunciation like that, they are going to tune it out as the product of a hyperactive imagination seeking partisan political advantage.

      In the end, calling everything racism gives an awful lot of cover to racists.

      • To who? Dog whistles exist. They are utilized by the cynical. Who gets the benefit of the doubt? Any given GOP voter x could get the benefit of the doubt. The party as a whole can’t, unless you think the party doesn’t stain itself with these tactics. Certainly ‘calling everything racism’ is inapt. But defending every specific charge with “you’re just calling everything racism” is empty, inadequate, and a rationalization. Do you really think that if less was pointed out the charge that ‘we call everything racism’ would diminish? Should we, when we see racism, demure for strategic reasons and put up with it endemically?

  8. Presidents always get grief for too many vacations at Camp David, playing golf… so could someone please tell me, without grinning and laughing, how a smack from Superstar Mark Rubio against Obama for golfing is a freaking racial code word?

    Golf, and golf culture, is one of the last bastions of white male privilege: the upper echelon of white country club members, (you know, the Republican base…) when they think of golf and African Americans in the same thought, they think of African Americans as caddies. Anybody who’s played golf anytime in the last twenty years (I’m looking at you, John Boehner…) has been confronted with this issue, repeatedly.

    Augusta finally admitted women just last week. They dug in their heels and refused to admit Blacks until the 1990’s

    The truly diabolical aspect to an effective dog whistle is the ease with which people not atttuned to it are dismissive of it… The fact that you can’t hear it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. That’s why it is called a ‘dog whistle.’ The energy with which you turn to dismissing it, only enforces it.

    Duh.

    • Doesn’t matter whether you mean it or not, see…

      The truly diabolical aspect to an effective dog whistle is the ease with which people not atttuned to it are dismissive of it… The fact that you can’t hear it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. That’s why it is called a ‘dog whistle.’ The energy with which you turn to dismissing it, only enforces it.

      But, you might be forgetting that in most cases when you don’t hear something it means EXACTLY that there is nothing there!

      • Might you engage the idea, since the Nixon Southern Strategy, that GOP operatives (see, I didn’t include you!) have been carefully playing a game whereby they can appeal to “negrophobes” to use prominent campaign operative Lee Atawater’s term without offending others.

        The most famous example, by the way, has been where Reagan began his 1980 campaign, but there have been plenty of others. States rights, anyone?

        Discerning when dog whistling is occurring is not easy because it involves understanding 2 different audiences. One is not going to be a member of both audiences.

      • … don’t, its probably a dog whistle. Evidence that some don’t hear it, therefore, is not evidence that it isn’t a dog whistle. Whether you yourself hear it is irrelevant unless ‘you’ is ‘everyone’.

    • a racial origin for “jimmies.” I’ve met super PC people who wouldn’t say “gyp” because it was offensive to the Roma. I didn’t even know it referred to them. Of course, I didn’t know how to spell it either. I’d never written it.

      Your language police officer might also keep an eye out for vanishing hitchhikers because the idea that “jimmies” is a racist term is probably an urban legend.

      There’s enough truly offensive language out there already no need to search for etymological offenses.

  10. Or less politely, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD WHY ARE PEOPLE RACIALLY PREJUDICED IN THE 21ST CENTURY! A difference in skin color to me is no more significant that a difference in eye or hair color. It would never occur to me to see someone who looks different as inferior. When you think about it this is just schoolyard bullying for adults, and it absolutely blows my mind that anyone thinks in these terms a full 150 years since slavery and two generations after the last explicitly discriminatory laws were repealed or overturned.

    • it isn’t skin color, it’s the culture. The GOP wants more black people to be p[art of our party. We very much like the black people who are part of our party. Maybe it’s because they think like we do so we don’t care what color they are. I really like Condy Rice and don’t care what color she is, Herman Caine is sort of strange but I have no problem with him due to skin color… I think most Republicans feel the same way.

      • who are not racists. Racism, however, plays out directly and indirectly in the party all the time.

        The thing is that there is a certain solidarity among black folks. Part of that solidarity comes from knowing that the overwhelming poverty suffered by blacks was caused by hundreds of years of discrimination. Everyday slights serve as a reminder of how precarious the gains of the last 50 years have been. For every hand the GOP offers, there’s a Southern strategy move or an actual racist to slap black folks in the face. Voter suppression? Some of you on here talk about it like deniers talk about global warming. Black folks, on the other hand, know how things work. They aren’t apt to be fooled.

        • We could say instead that GOP operatives are happy to appeal to racism if it helps their bottom line, and so we’ve gotten a lot of coded racism. The “law and order” theme from Nixon’s campaigns had a definite racial edge.

          • But I would also, predictably, mention that DEM operatives, “are happy to appeal to charges of racism if it helps their bottom line, and so we’ve gotten a lot of charges of racism.” That’s why Lawrence O’Donnell, Mr Ed, Mathews and others will be throwing around the race card when ever they can since it may build into something which either directly will cost Republicans votes OR will divert resources and get people off message thereby costing votes.

            • they are not Democratic operatives.

              You really don’t want me to list Mr Beck’s, Mr Limbaugh’s, or Rep Bachmann’s looseness with facts, do you?

                • that’s why I picked them.

                  AL SHARPTON: Let me show you, one of the most contemptible statements to people that are struggling around these working-class issues was made by Willard Mitt Romney. Let me show you what he said the night he won the Iowa caucuses. He kind of dismissed the drive to close the income gap and to deal with economic inequality like people were just jealous or envious of the rich. Watch this, congressman.

                  and…

                  Republican attacks on President Obama’s welfare policy are part of a “shockingly transparent” campaign to play the race card in the 2012 presidential campaign, says Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. They are, she says, “a dog whistle for voters who consider race when casting their ballot.”

                  Are there a lot of people that say, ‘You know what, the number one issue that I want to hear about from either presidential candidate is about his policy on welfare reform?’ I mean, why else—it’s so shockingly transparent—why else would Mitt Romney make a supposedly casual joke about the president’s place of birth, you know, juxtaposed against his own place of birth? Why else would he spend millions of dollars of Mitt Romney campaign money talking about—putting out a lie, and then repeating it over and over and over when there isn’t a single fact checking organization that has said that it’s accurate, that it has any accuracy—in fact it’s the opposite—except to be a dog whistle for voters who consider race when casting their ballot?

                  MITT ROMNEY: President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial. And in the last few days we’ve seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation. The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.

                  SHARPTON: Bitter politics of envy, like there’s no legitimate concern for what you and I have just talked about, the overwhelming increase in the richest’s income while the stagnation of working-class and poor people. But the problem is we’re just envious. How do people talk about they believe in the American Dream, less known [sic] King’s dream, when they have a public policy of taking away from those that already have the least and act as though if they say something about it, they’re engaged in the politics of envy?

                  JAMES CLYBURN: Well, you know, that’s a little bit like saying to Rosa Parks, that you are just jealous, envious, of that man who’s got a seat on this bus because you want a seat on the bus.

                • Al Sharpton is not a Democratic operative in any sense. I don’t think his views are as goofy as hers, but it is a bit like saying Sarah Palin is a Republican operative. She doesn’t run campaigns, work in the PR offices, etc. She acts as a gadfly outside the main GOP structures. Likewise, I can’t imagine Obama or the Obama people wanting Sharpton in their formal organization. Heavens, Howard Dean was too much for them.

                • Welfare has always been a classic dog whistle issue like states rights and law and order before it. The discussion of income inequality — which you consistently read/misunderstand as “They hate rich people!” — seems remarkably sober and staid. The conservative side of the aisle has had a disappointing response to that whole issue, by the way. It can be summarized as “There isn’t really income equality… Oh, there might be, whatever. You’re just envious.”

                • was from the South Side of Chicago. Hint, hint. Here’s a paragraph about actual research into the whole racism, dog-whistle thing:

                  As Martin Gilens notes in his 1999 book, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, there is a strong correlation between views on race and opposition to welfare. “Most white Americans believe that blacks are less committed to the work ethic than are whites, and this belief is strongly related to opposition to welfare,” Gilens writes. This association began in the mid-1960s, when, Gilens notes, the ratio of African-Americans in photos attached to articles about poverty jumped drastically. Until then, Americans largely associated poverty with Appalachia, but as depictions of poverty changed, so did stereotypes. “Despite the fact that African Americans constitute only 36 percent of welfare recipients and only 27 percent of poor Americans, whites’ attitudes toward poverty and welfare are dominated by their beliefs about blacks,” Gilens says.

                • dog-whistle politics. Actual documentation, not just argument.

                  Whatever dog-whistling your morally bankrupt party does is within this context and this history. Calling Obama the “food stamp” president is a coded message. The only people I know who’ve been on welfare were white., but what comes to mind when people mention welfare?

                  You know this and that’s why you’re writing a cryptically stupid comment here.

                • Having been created yesterday, the Republican Party cannot be explained by historical evidence. The current coalition of which it is constituted was built by Mitt Romney all by himself.

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