The Dog Whistler

An Obama supporter's Pavlovian reaction to one of her own pet phrases.

By JAMES TARANTO

 

Salon's Joan Walsh is spoiling for a catfight with our colleagues Kim Strassel and Peggy Noonan. What has Walsh's back up is their observation that whether or not President Obama directly ordered the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies to persecute dissenters, he encouraged them to do so with his unpresidential public pronouncements. As Strassel put it in her Wall Street Journal column last Friday:

Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Walsh doesn't mention Time's Mark Halperin, who made essentially the same point in a friendly May 2012 report on the Obama campaign last May: "Any right-wing plutocrat who exercises a First Amendment right to try to stop another Obama term will have his or her ties to Big Oil, Wall Street or some similarly well-heeled bogeyman filleted in a reply ad."

WhiteHouse.gov

Someone's having a ruff second term.

But what really gets Walsh's goat is the phrase Noonan used to sum up Strassel's observation in a "Meet the Press" roundtable moderated by unofficial White House spokesman David Gregory. Noonan referred to Obama's smearing of private citizens as a "dog whistle." As we explained last August: "In politics, a dog whistle is a rhetorical device--an oral expression susceptible to two interpretations, one straightforward and one, metaphorically speaking, at a higher frequency."

Noonan's use of the metaphor was entirely apt. Jaded political observers listened to Candidate Obama and heard (depending on their leanings) either a viciously desperate politician or a feisty fighter. Agents of the government heard President Obama, their ultimate boss, urging them to turn their attention toward evildoers.

As we've repeatedly argued, if that is the extent of Obama's involvement in the scandal, it is much more worrisome than if the persecution of dissidents was carried out under his direct orders. It would mean that the government itself--the permanent institutions of the state, not just the administration currently in office--has turned against the citizenry and the Constitution.

Noonan's use of "dog whistle" is especially neuralgic for Walsh because it is a pet phrase of many on the left, including Walsh herself. Here's an August excerpt of her charmingly named book "What's the Matter With White People":

Paul Ryan, he of the "Ryan Plan" to abolish Medicare, divides the electorate into "makers" and "takers."

This is coded language meant to whip the GOP base into a frenzy of fear and resentment. Because for the past forty years, we've all known who the "takers" were, or were supposed to be, anyway: the welfare queens, the urban rioters, the students, the slackers, the various people the Democrats sided with in the 1960s, most of them, in the partisan story-telling, African American.

During the 2012 campaign, we kept hearing that Republicans were using "dog whistles" to remind supposedly racist voters that Obama was black. Unlike Noonan's use of the phrase, that made no sense. Actual canines may be colorblind, but it's hard to imagine how anybody could be considered racist who can't tell Obama is black by looking at him.

Walsh is upset by the appropriation of "dog whistle" because it's sauce for the goose. She thinks the term should be exclusive to the left attacking the right for racism. Yet the crucial characteristic of a dog whistle is that humans can't hear it. The only people who've ever acknowledged hearing the supposed Republican dog whistles are race-obsessed lefties like Walsh and Chris Matthews. If anyone is racist, they are.

True, you can tell that a dog whistle makes a sound by watching how the dog reacts to it. Strassel and Noonan construed Obama's campaign trash talk as a dog whistle because the IRS and other agencies quickly sprung into action. So maybe Walsh, Matthews and the others don't hear the GOP dog whistles but merely infer them from the reaction of the "dogs," or voters.

But what is it that the dogs do? Vote against Obama. That's a horse of a different color from the IRS's abusing its power for political purposes. Voting against a major-party presidential candidate is in fact perfectly normal, civic-minded behavior. Literally every voter in every presidential election votes against a major-party presidential candidate.

Here is an example of the perverted moral reasoning that results from the left's illusion of moral authority: For Walsh, it is not as bad for liberals to use the coercive power of the administrative state to subvert democracy as it is for conservatives to vote.

Toward the end of her 700-word outburst, Walsh writes: "It's wrong to dignify Noonan with too much attention." Me-OW!

 

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