Enough already! Race? We don't want to hear it.

The Clinton Campaign and Trump Campaign exchanged sharp words at Harvard.

The news has been covering the bickering between the Clinton and Trump campaigns.   It came in audiotaped--but not videotaped--meetings at the Institute of Politics at the JFK School of Government on .Wednesday and Thursday of this week.   I watched the dustup between Bobby Mook, the Clinton campaign manager, and Kellyanne Conway, the Trump campaign manager that has not yet been in the news since the event is embargoed until Sunday morning when it will be broadcast on CNN's State of the Nation show.

Their were more sharp words about race and who ran a racist campaign in an event not yet public.   Bobby Mook said the Trump campaign and its semi-official web news outlet, Breitbart.com, were making white racist appeals in the campaign.   Kellyanne Conway dismissed it.   In my post yesterday I said it was a "dog whistle" campaign message, with racial messages made in a way that was deniable.  Indeed, I watched it denied, vigorously.

Frequent Guest Post author Thad Guyer commented that both campaigns were essentially equivalent in their appeals to "identity politics", with Trump making comments about Mexicans and Muslims that were, to quote Paul Ryan, "textbook racism"; meanwhile, Clinton appealed to people of color, describing her election as the path to ending their oppression.  Both ran openly racist campaigns and there was nothing subtle or unheard about it, Guyer said.  We witnessed two racist campaigns.

My own sense is that the Clinton campaign persisted with identity politics through to the end.  She wanted and and expected women to vote their gender, blacks their race, and Hispanics their resentment at being broad brushed as criminal.   She did not say whites were criminals, nor rapists, nor terrorist-sympathizers but she did position whites as beneficiaries of prejudice and perpetrators of it.  In Hillary's world view Goldman Sachs, with its exemplary efforts in diversity, hiring women and blacks from Ivy League colleges, was doing good.  A working class white man, struggling to get by on $12/hour, frustrated by competition from new immigrants to his work as a house framer or concrete finisher, was a deplorable.   She never really shook off that message and positioning.

In the closing two weeks of the campaign Trump shifted emphasis.  News reports focused on his use of a teleprompter but my own observations is that key was the change in message.   It was less about criminal people of color and more about jobs and corruption in Washington DC.  He presumably had locked in his race-resentment white base, but his open racism was offensive to some regular Republican voters--the kinds of people who agree with Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell that overt open racism is contrary to American values, and given our struggles in the Middle East with Muslim-majority allies, against American interests.

Poll insiders Joel Breneman and Tony Fabrizio at Harvard Thursday

On Thursday I witnessed the pollsters of both campaigns report that they watched the undecided voters and voters who said they favored 3rd parties break decisively for Trump in those last two weeks of the campaign.  As Kellyanne Conway put it, voters decided to ignore what offended them in order to vote for policies that affected them.

Trump quit offending voters uncomfortable with his race hints and began talking about jobs, trade, special interests, and draining the swamp.   The racial undertone went silent.   It became a dog whistle, not overt and audible, which gave non racists permission to vote for Trump.

To her disadvantage and peril, Hillary Clinton never gave up identity politics and did not express a clear appeal to jobs for blue collar white men, who she lost in such numbers that some blue states tipped red.   In the Hillary Clinton frame, white blue collar males were the oppressors.  They don't feel like oppressors, and they didn't like being called an oppressor.

Guyer

Thad Guyer Comment

"Battle of the Racist Dog Whistles"—at first blush, that might sound like a pretty good title for the Harvard conference. Wikipedia gives a good definition of the operative term: “Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.” By that definition, I’m not convinced we were hearing dog whistles at all. Dog whistles are supposed to be subtle and inaudible except for a special few. Trump’s call that illegal Mexican immigration are rapists and criminals was audible to everyone as a racist message. Clinton’s basket of deplorables was audible to everyone as a racist message. I’m not hearing the subtlety or hidden nature of the messages. What I heard were two fundamentally racist campaigns battling it out under the semi-legitimate label of “identity politics”. 

“If providing a platform for white supremacists makes me a brilliant tactician, I am glad to have lost,” Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri railed at the Harvard conference. No subtlety or dog whistles there. This message that the Trump deplorables--i.e., “half” of those white working class voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan-- are racists ultimately became the cornerstone of the Clinton campaign. It was no less a racist message than Trump’s message against illegal immigrants and Muslims. 

Clinton rallied dark skinned voters against white skinned voters, just as Trump rallied white skinned voters against dark skinned voters. There was nothing subtle about it. Obama’s hope that, with his election, America had entered a new golden “post racial” political era was audacious indeed. Trump and Clinton ran loud and audible racist campaigns, and that is our new political reality. We should be so lucky as to return to the days of dog whistles. That might well be our new audacity of hope.