Dog Whistle Blues

What once was an invisible dog whistle has now risen to a stark crescendo as conservatives try to blame their losses in the recent election on minorities and the young. By now everybody in the western world has heard or read the transcript of Romney's post election call to his donors;

Mitt Romney blamed his loss partly on policy items or "gifts" -- that President Barack Obama supported aimed at core constituencies, including Hispanic, young, and black voters.

"What the president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote, and that strategy worked," Romney said, according to audio of the call obtained by ABC News.

"It's a proven political strategy, which is giving a bunch of money to a group and, guess what, they'll vote for you," he added. "Immigration we can solve, but the giving away free stuff is a hard thing to compete with." 

I disagree with Mitt. They didn't vote for Obama because he promised them stuff, they voted for Obama because the other guys were a bunch of assholes. Which politician was it the other day who said that the problem was that not enough white men came out to vote? As if they should all vote as a monolithic block. That was one of the biggest hoots of the election, that Mitt was targeting uneducated white males. You got too much education boy, we don't want to talk to you.

Bill O'Reilly took up the white cause on election day.

“The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly said. “And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

“The demographics are changing,” he said. “It’s not a traditional America anymore.” O’Reilly said 50 percent of the voting public are people who “want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it, and he ran on it.”

Maine GOP head Charlie Webster thinks that there were too many blacks showing up to vote in Maine.

"In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day," he said in an interview with WSCH TV. "Everybody has the right to vote, but nobody in town knows anybody that's black -- how did that happen? I don't know. We're going to find out."

Denise Helms didn't think it was that big a deal. She called obama a nigger on facebook after the election and mused that "maybe he would get assassinated." Now she has lost her job at Coldstone Creamery.

Helms says that she isn't a racist. "I didn't think it would be that big of a deal," Helms told FOX40 Sacramento in an interview outside her workplace at the Turlock Cold Stone Creamery. "The assassination part is kind of harsh. I'm not saying I'd go do that or anything like that, by any means, but if it was to happen I don't think I'd care one bit."

The October 28 AP poll on racial attitudes in this country shows that people have become more racist against blacks and hispanics in the last four years. A slight majority of Americans now harbor racial prejudices against blacks and hispanics according to the polling data.

Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.

In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.

"As much as we'd hope the impact of race would decline over time ... it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago," said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with AP to develop the survey.

Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison.

The poll finds that racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans. Although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the two parties. That test showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political independents (49 percent).

Kids are jumping aboard the racism express as well.

I think that the conservative strategy of blaming women, minorities and young will backfire badly. Voters don't like to be typecast as whores willing to sell their vote to the highest bidder. I voted the way I voted and have never taken a penny of government assistance. Neither have the great majority of democrats that I know.

I had hoped that we were farther along in terms of race than we apparently are. I think that this election is a sign post that the old guard has officially passed. Stoking the fires of racial division is not going to put the republican humpty dumpty together again.