Dog Whistles and Plausible Deniability

New category; The Joy of Lex, in which I examine words, language and how they are used.

In this post, I mean to talk about two different devices used in political speech -- the dog whistle, and plausible deniability.  These are often confused because they are both forms of double meaning.  But they use of double meaning differently.

A dog whistle is so-called because dogs have a different range of hearing than humans.  In particular, they can hear higher frequencies, so that actual, literal dog whistles exist that dogs can hear but humans cannot.  A dog whistle statement, then, is one that has one meaning to the general public and another, covert, meaning that only a small number of insiders recognize. The goal is to convey a hidden message to a select group of listeners that the general and journalistic public miss.

Plausible deniability, on the other hand, is a statement with two readily apparent meanings, one offensive and one inoffensive.  When a politician makes such a statement, both meanings are clear, not just to insiders, but to the general and journalistic public as well.  Indeed, the whole point of plausible deniability is to be called out for the offensive meaning and then whine that one is being unfairly accused by the liberal media.

One point here, then, is that dog whistles are generally not about race.  Indeed, our society has become so absurdly hypersensitive about race that racial dog whistles are almost impossible because almost anything can be said to have a veiled racial meaning.  I have even heard questions about whether Obama is too skinny to be President interpreted as a coded racial appeal. 

So if you can't get even to most covert racial comment past the public, what is a genuine dog whistle?  When George W. Bush criticized Dred Scott as an example of judicial activism, that was a true dog whistle.  The right-to-life crowd immediately understood that he was comparing abortion to slavery.  Outsiders were simply baffled.  Paul Ryan may have pulled off a brilliant dog whistle in his convention speech, when he said, "[T]he greatest of all responsibilities, is that of the strong to protect the weak. The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves."  The face value meaning of that statement, the way it is most likely to be interpreted by the general and journalistic public is as a promise not to balance the budget on the backs of the poor, even though his budget plan proposes to do just that.*  But it has been suggested (alas, can't find the link) that this is actually a dog whistle, having nothing to do with the poor or social spending, but as a call to protect the unborn from abortion.  If so, then THAT is a highly successful dog whistle.

By contrast, an example of plausible deniability is Mitt Romney's claim that Obama gutted welfare-to-work requirements.  The racial subtext is clear.  But let's face it.  The main point of making such a comment is to make the racial subtext clear. Google "racist dog whistle."  Most of the links are of conservative sites complaining about the unfair accusations.  Some complaints are well-founded (See "Obama too skinny" above).  But with comments like one about gutting the welfare-to-work requirement, it is hard to see them as anything but attempts to provoke an accusation of racism in order to be offended by it.  And that is not, by any reasonable standard, a dog whistle.

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*Well, to make the poor bear the brunt of spending cuts, anyhow.  No doubt the tax cuts, defense increases, and exemption of Social Security and Medicare will prevent the budget from actually balancing.