Agendas and Dog-Whistle Politics

Today sees William Safire discussing the origins of the phrase "dog-whistle politics", meaning messages that reach an intended audience but not others. And the Washington Post Outlook section has Jeffrey Birnbaum writing on "The Forces That Set the Agenda" " [warning, as of 2pm the link was faulty, giving only the title and not the text of the article]: "

In the grand scheme of things, Social Security isn't the nation's biggest fiscal problem. That's not my view. That's the assessment of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Bush political appointee before he became head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, who says that looming financial calamities in Medicare and Medicaid are larger and more immediate worries in a strictly budgetary sense." He goes on to discuss the role of organizations like AARP in making Social Security a focus. Small businesses played a key role in the estate tax debate.

I see both as relating to David Broder's column on the judicial nominee fight (see my post here).

The common thread is the individualization of politics, retail politics. In the 1940's and 50's, there were 3 TV networks, a handful of radio stations, some national magazines like Readers Digest, Life, Time, Colliers and that was it. Politically there was big business with the NAM and the Chamber of Commerce, big labor with the AFL and the CIO, and big agriculture with the Farm Bureau and Farmers Union. Throw in a few membership organizations like Knights of Columbus, Elks, League of Women Voters, American Legion, AMA, and ABA and you had the major political players.

50 years later media has proliferated, the membership organizations have lost their dominance, and mail-based advocacy organizations have multiplied. The key to all this is the original bureaucratic organization, i.e, the Post Office, with junk mail and the computerization of data. The new organizations spend much less time socializing at local and state levels and much more time raising money through mailed appeals and targeted media--dog whistles. Both Robert Putnam ("Bowling Alone" and "Better Together: Restoring the American Community") and Theda Skocpol "Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life" have written on this theme. They convince me.

Because people learned how to use computers to develop mailing lists, they could create magazines targeted to niche audiences. They learned how to massage census data and commercial data to refine their advertisements and magazines. From there it was a short step to applying the tools to politics, creating advocacy organizations to support lobbyists on K Street. In my own area of agriculture, the dominance of the Farm Bureau has been challenged by all the commodity groups, each one organized around a crop. The politics of specialization works differently than the politics I was taught in the 50's and 60's. While we still have farm bills, much of the Congressional work is done through the appropriations process and amendments to "must pass" legislation, whether it's the budget reconciliation measures, emergency legislation responding to agricultural "emergencies", or whatever. You get the explosion of "earmarks" of money for projects that never went through peer review in the case of science or through the authorization process in the case of pork.

With specialized communications networks and organizations at their disposal, political operators can work outside the vision of the mainstream media, whether it's to agitate the waves over judicial nominees or to fight over social security when Medicare is really in much greater trouble.

Can blogging, or anything else, change this? Doubtful.