On Flag Pins and Complex Racist Rumor-Mongering

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 7:55 AM on March 4, 2008.

This article in Salon is really cute. It’s about candidates who wear the flag pin non-stop seem to be the ones dropped out of the race the fastest, so maybe the best explanation for why Obama opts out is that he doesn’t want to lose.

Do we see a subtle pattern emerging here? Every presidential candidate of both parties who ever wore a lapel flag during the debates, even as briefly as Biden, bought himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

And every major party candidate who remains viable today — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — has seldom if ever been spotted with a flag in his or her lapel….

Dosed with Pentothal, each would most likely come up with a variant of the answer Obama had hinted at: that lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don’t want sticking to your fingers these days.

For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies and a cruel war with neither point nor end.

No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.

But what I found interesting was that while the writer noticed that McCain, Huckabee, and Clinton all go without the lapel pin, only Obama gets shit for it, he didn’t offer any explanations as to why. Maybe he thinks everyone knows why, but I’m not sure it’s universal knowledge as to what right wingers who give a shit are getting at. Complaining about Obama’s non-existent flag pin is a classic right wing dog whistle, like Bush mentioning the Dred Scott decision during a debate as a hat tip for those who think so little of black people’s historical sufferings that they compare that to the sufferings of embryos who, unlike actual black persons, can’t feel or think or have personalities and families and friends who love their unique selves.

In this case, the flag pin dust-up is a hat tip to the right wing belief that Obama is secretly a Muslim. I mean, they’ve got a slew of “evidence” to this secret Muslim status, but while pundits will occasionally bring up these spurious claims during debates, I’ve not seen anyone make the direct link between his not wearing a flag pin and his supposedly secret Muslim status. The bullshit rumors about him not saying the Pledge, yes, but those are open lies, so a lot easier to shut down. The background on this is that every time a Muslim person or family resists compulsory patriotism for various religious reasons—some people just have an issue with the Pledge, because it has a blatantly Christian prayer injected into it, and some might have other reasons—it becomes hot news on the right wing email circuit, and has since forever. It’s part of reaffirming the belief that America is rightfully a Christian theocracy, and that the flag and the Pledge are equal parts symbols of Christianity and America. Black Muslims especially are considered suspicious.

It’s this sort of thing that makes me wonder why blatant sexism aimed at Hillary Clinton is dragged out as evidence that America is more sexist than racist. Sure, you can call women dumb out loud in this country, but I’m not sure that racist insinuations are any better. In some respects, I prefer the open insult to the insinuation, because it’s easier to push back. Fury rained upon the WaPo because of Charlotte Allen’s ridiculous article, but if she’d stuck to stating her points more obliquely, she could hide behind plausible deniability. But the insinuations that Obama’s race and background and lapel pin means that he’s a secret Muslim terrorist sympathizer is going to be a lot harder to push back against.

First of all, you have to call it out. But how do you say, “No, he’s not!” without insinuating either that being a Muslim is bad or that all Muslims are secret terrorist sympathizers? It’s nearly impossible. The Obama campaign has decided to push back by drawing attention to the fact that he’s a Christian, which while the most politically obvious thing to do, does carry this insinuation that it would be a bad thing if he were a Muslim. Naomi Klein has called out the campaign for this.

Of course Obama must correct the record, but he doesn’t have to stop there. What is disturbing about the campaign’s response is that it leaves unchallenged the disgraceful and racist premise behind the entire “Muslim smear”: that being Muslim is de facto a source of shame. Obama’s supporters often say they are being “Swiftboated,” casually accepting the idea that being accused of Muslimhood is tantamount to being accused of treason.

Substitute another faith or ethnicity, and you’d expect a very different response. Consider a report from the archives of this magazine. Thirteen years ago, Daniel Singer, The Nation’s late, much-missed Europe correspondent, went to Poland to cover a hotly contested presidential election. He reported that the race had descended into an ugly debate over whether one of the candidates, Aleksander Kwasniewski, was a closet Jew. The press claimed his mother had been buried in a Jewish cemetery (she was still alive), and a popular TV show aired a skit featuring the Christian candidate dressed as a Hasidic Jew. “What perturbed me,” Singer wryly observed, “was that Kwasniewski’s lawyers threatened to sue for slander rather than press for an indictment under the law condemning racist propaganda.”

We should expect no less of the Obama campaign. When asked during the Ohio debate about Louis Farrakhan’s support for his candidacy, Obama did not hesitate to call Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic comments “unacceptable and reprehensible.” When the turban photo flap came up in the same debate, he used the occasion to say nothing at all.

She has a point, but there’s a couple of wrinkles there that we all know are there, and pretending they aren’t there isn’t going to help matters. One issue is the sincerity problem. It’s well understood that saying, “I’m not X, but there’s nothing wrong with being X,” often sounds mealy-mouthed, and often casts a shadow over the latter part of the statement. Try it at home. “I’m not a lesbian, not that there’s anything wrong with that!” You’re questioning my sincerity, against your will, even though you know that I’m sincere, right? We’re conditioned to considered that construction insincere.

The second problem is that the retort to a slur is best handled by being even shorter and to the point than the slur, lest the latter wins on comprehensibility issues. Which is to say, people have short attention spans. What’s more likely to get across to a large number of people? Saying, “I’m not a Muslim, I’m a Christian,” or saying, “Let me preface this by saying that accusing someone of having a different religious faith than the majority in America should hardly be considered an insult in a secular democracy, and my fellow Muslim citizens have equal right as I do to hold office, and as much ability, but in this particular case, the rumors being spread about me are untrue, though even if they were true, it shouldn’t matter.”

Cue the pundits giggling about the wordy, nerdy Democrats while swooning over John McCain’s baby back ribs recipe and talking about how it’s so cool to have a candidate to drink a beer with this time around who can actually drink the beer because he’s not a recovering alcoholic. Democrats have to be careful in this hostile media environment to avoid the use of dependent clauses, lest they get burdened with the too-smart-to-share-a-beer reputation.

The campaign is seeking ways to get out the message that even though Obama isn’t a Muslim, that Muslims are not bad people, all without bogging down the campaign with this issue. But it’s going to be a long haul. The complexities that visit someone trying to refute these rumors are precisely why Republican operatives are not about to let go of spreading these rumors. It’s win-win for them—either the candidate is tacitly complicit with racism (like Klein is accusing Obama of being) or the candidate is a wordy stick in the mud and look-McCain-the-war-hero. Nerd-baiting Democrats is the media’s favorite game, and part of why Clinton is flailing is that she fucking fell for it, the same way that Al Gore did, and is successfully getting portrayed as the petulant nerd.

By the way, I’d take this story about how Karl Rove told the wingnut press not to call Obama by his middle name with a grain of salt. This is a pretty classic Republican trick to create a space of plausible deniability between the official Republican party and the right wing operatives. It’s about letting McCain both take advantage of racism while keeping him clean of being called a racist. But I doubt that Rove actually wants the Limbaughs of the world to hold back on the racist rumor-mongering.

Tagged as: mccain, religion, islam, flag pins, patriotism, sexism, racism, clinton, obama

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon.