Salon.com > Lee Atwater

Peggy Noonan hears a dog whistle

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:45:00 +0000

Here’s the best evidence the GOP knows the IRS scandal doesn’t reach into the White House: Now they’re saying they don’t need to find evidence that President Obama directed or even knew about the investigation of Tea Party groups’ non-profit status; his actively campaigning for reelection represented a “dog whistle” to tell the agency to target his political enemies.

The dog whistle quote came via NBC's “Meet the Press” Sunday from Peggy Noonan, who can no longer be taken seriously as a writer or pundit. When host David Gregory pressed her on the lack of evidence for her claims that the IRS scandal was worse than Watergate, Noonan insisted that the president “was giving a dog whistle to people who could launch this thing." The former Reagan-Bush speechwriter vividly summed up, in her thousand points of crazy style, where the IRS “scandal” went over the last few days: Obama didn’t need to order the tax agency to harass Tea Party groups (and his critics don’t need proof that he did so): his criticizing the group during the 2012 campaign, as well as blasting the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, represented an implicit order to do so.

Karl Rove won’t surrender race card

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:21:00 +0000

Lee Atwater's claim to fame was his pioneering use of racially divisive imagery in political messages that, superficially, didn't seem to be about race at all. The most infamous examples, of course, were Atwater ads like the "Revolving Door" and the Willie Horton spots. Under the guise of a colorblind message about criminal justice, those spots homed in on African-American criminals in a deliberate effort to stoke racial fears among whites. In employing such a formula, the ads embodied the now-standard dog-whistle tactic for racial messaging -- a tactic that itself was an outgrowth of Atwater's guiding political principle about euphemistic language.

"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger,'" he said. "By 1968 you can’t say 'nigger' -- that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites."

Audio of Lee Atwater’s infamous ’81 interview on the Southern strategy

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 21:39:00 +0000

In an audio clip from 1981, obtained exclusively by Rick Perlstein at the Nation, you can hear campaign consultant Lee Atwater's infamous description of the Republican "Southern Strategy," or how they can win the votes of racists without sounding like racists:

Perlstein explains the context:

The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater's name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times' Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column—then five more times over the next four years.

James Carter IV, who also unearthed Romney's 47 percent video, dug up the full interview with Atwater. You can listen to all 42 minutes at the Nation.