Dog Whistle, My Ass
Mar 12th, 2008 at 9:12 pm by Susie
Kevin Drum gets it right:
Jonathan Cohn says this about Geraldine Ferraro’s recent comments to the press:
Ferraro’s original statement to Daily Breeze, which suggested that Obama has gotten preferential political treatment because of his race, was a dog-whistle to white voters who resent affirmative action.
Well, sure. Except for one thing. Torrance is a faceless little bedroom community most famous for having a big shopping mall, and the Torrance Daily Breeze is a faceless little local newspaper with a circulation of about 60,000. Nobody outside the South Bay reads it, Ferraro’s comment was buried near the end of the original article, California has already voted, and no one in the Obama campaign cared about it. In fact, nobody would ever have noticed her remarks in the first place if Kos hadn’t highlighted them three days after they appeared. Ferraro’s moment in the national press didn’t start until after the blogosphere erupted.
If Ferraro was trying to do some dog whistling, she sure picked an unusually ineffective forum for it. It’s way more likely that she just blurted out something dumb to a local reporter, and then got her dander up when people started piling on about it. That’s no excuse for saying something dumb and then following it up with something even dumber, but it’s pretty unlikely that Ferraro had any serious dog whistling agenda here.
Another reason Ferraro wouldn’t back down, I think, is that she’s dying of cancer and she just doesn’t give a shit what other people think. Dying often has that effect on people.
Nice try of defending Ferraro (and by extension, Hillary), Susie, except for one small problem: when the comments did in fact make it to the big media markets, Ferraro didn’t repudiate or tone them down at all; in fact, she actually intensified and defended her crass remarks.
This was no flippant comment by Ferraro, whether cancer-induced or not; this was a deliberate attempt to play the race card and to slam Obama as some form of undeserving Black candidate. And the fact that Hillary did next to nothing to repudiate Ferraro’s comments says a hell of a lot about her (Hillary’s) strategy of winning at all costs or bringing the Democratic Party down to the ground for her own personal political benefit.
And before you dismiss me as an Obama cultist, you should know that I’m not even a registered Democrat, and that I reject both Clinton and Obama as too conservative and corpratist; my vote will be for the Green Party (especially if Cynthia McKinney is their candidate). I dislike Obama’s pandering to the Right as much as any Leftist/Progressive; but his offenses pale in comparison to the vile and disgusting racism and destructive politics that Hillary’s people have fostered on this campaign.
Keith Olbermann was absolutely right on the button tonight in his Special Comment; and anyone who supports Hillary Clinton as the “proven progressive Democrat” should ask themselves how they can continue to defend her campaign in the midst of these latest acts of desperation.
Anthony
You know, I’m a longtime student of Carl Jung, and I have to say, the man really WAS a genius.
I agree it was never Ferraro’s intention to dog whistle. She’s not that smart. It was, however, the Clinton campaign’s slow and tepid response that some of our less sophisticated voters in Pennsylvania heard. And believe me, they got it loud and clear.
Hillary knows just where the line is…and she played this one just about perfectly. She’ll win big in PA with white, working class, uneducated voters.
So clearly you think white, working class, uneducated voters are inherently stupid and racist. Is that that inclusive “new politics” I keep reading about?
Ferraro’s comments and her response to the uproar over them are a perfect illustration of her generation’s attitude toward race, life, the universe and everything. The boomers don’t apologize, they don’t change their minds, they don’t explain themselves. They expect the world to bend to their whims. In reality, they are about to suffer the fate that they themselves have arranged for themselves: old age in a country that doesn’t give a crap about the elderly. Their sunny dispositions and intransigent selfishness aren’t going to win them any friends in the gloaming of their wasted lives, either.
Ferraro is merely the modern archetype of a generation lost in its own delusions of what is right and what it deserves from the universe.
Abby, WTF? Ferraro isn’t a “Boomer” - you don’t even know what you’re talking about. She was born in the early 1930s, during the Depression, one of the “Greatest Generation”. Boomers are post-WWII - born 1946 to 1964.
What you really meant to say was “old” or “over 30″. You know, Boomers used to say that too = when they were young and ignorant.