Dogwhistling
The Spin Cycle blog at Newsday does some research, after talking with McCain’s campaign about their latest “Celebrity” ad:
Sex celebs: Why Britney and Paris?
…They said they thought the ad was legitimate because Obama is a big celebrity…and Britney and Paris were Number 2 and 3.
The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday’s news. Here’s a link to Forbes’ Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don’t even make the list any more.
…So, they didn’t pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married.
What they picked was two sexually available white women.
And that’s exactly the image the McCain camp wanted you to see, with the undertones of miscegenation beneath the obvious theme of fame.
The media ran with it yesterday, of course, giving the ad much greater reach by playing it over and over again. And even though Harold Ford on MSNBC said he didn’t think it was racism in play, it was, just as it was with the “Call Me, Harold” ad which was used against Ford himself.
The Obama campaign’s response ad is pretty good, but they have to move faster on this stuff. While they spent a couple of days meeting with experts in economics, we lost several news cycles to repetitions of McCain talking points. Of course economics is more important in the larger scheme of things, but we still have an election to win, and no time to waste in responding to these smears.
BagNewsNotes has more detailed analysis of the images in the “Celebrity” ad.
If you’re uncertain about the exact meaning of “dogwhistle”, see this post by Digby. She understands it all.