First posted January 22. I enjoyed Fred Clark's comments so much I stole his whole post. February 7 someone else takes note of the governor's rhetorical gifts. Having been spoon-fed this kind of language from childhood, I haven't paid much attention, but with the man's growing profile this not-so-subtle talent is worth noting.
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He said it so well I'm stealing the whole thing. I'm leaving out a couple of footnotes, so if you want to read those and check out the comment thread you'll have to go there. I first heard reference to "dog-whistle politics" about three years ago and have had my ears perked up ever since. Obviously Fred's ears have been trained longer than that. This is rich!
Doing my best impression of Barbara Billingsley in Airplane: "Oh stewardess! I speak evangelical ..."
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Former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was very skilled at peppering President George W. Bush's public statements with so-called "dog whistle" language targeting evangelical Christian voters. These passing phrases and allusions wouldn't alter or confuse Bush's message to other listeners, but they would have an additional resonance for the evangelicals listening. The actual meaning of those phrases didn't much matter, what was important was that he came across as conversant in the local idiom, the insider's jargon.
To cite a famous example, when Bush said that he believed in the "wonder-working pow'r" of the American people, the message was simply that if Bush used that phrase he must know that song, so he must've sung that song, so he must've been to church, so he must be one of us. No one was supposed to, and few did, think too hard about the bizarre meaning of that statement -- which seemed to equate the American people with "the precious blood of the lamb," suggesting that we could, by rallying around our president, "be free from the burden of sin." That (heretical, arrogant, insane) implication wasn't the point of the allusion. The point was just to reassure evangelicals that he spoke their language, and was therefore on their side, without scaring off everyone else.
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Unlike Bush, Mike Huckabee really is a native speaker of the evangelical idiom. He isn't just parroting phrases spelled out phonetically for him by some Wheaton-alum speechwriter, he's talking the way he naturally talks. The effect for evangelical voters is thus the same -- they are reassured he is "one of us." But the effect for everyone else is quite different, because unlike Bush's dog whistles, everyone else can hear Huckabee's allusions too and non-native speakers have a hard time making sense of what he's saying.
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To take a trivial example, Huckabee has on several occasions mentioned that he reads a chapter from Proverbs* every day and that he carries his New Testament with him for this purpose. The book of Proverbs, of course, is not in the New Testament, but evangelicals are all familiar with the Pocket Testament League's tiny volumes, the size of a deck of cards, that include not just the 27 books of the New Testament but also the Psalms and Proverbs.** These editions were designed for convenience and not with the intent of dismissing the other 37 books of the Hebrew Scriptures as unimportant, although it's worth noting that most American evangelicals wouldn't notice if the prophets suddenly disappeared from their Bibles. (Evangelical reading tends to focus on Paul's Epistles, Proverbs and pselected Psalms, which is also why Huckabee earns points for his frequent citations from Proverbs but Barack Obama gets none for quoting the book of Amos, as he did yesterday.)
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More potentially confusing is Huckabee's reference to "a living God." He used this phrase in the comment we looked at earlier, in which the former Arkansas governor explicitly endorses theocracy. Here again is that comment, as reported by MSNBC:
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"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said..
Over at Making Light, Avram Grumer has some fun with this juxtaposition of "living God" and talk of the Constitution. Since the idea of a "living Constitution" is often railed against by social conservatives who see it as a synonym for "anything goes," Grumer wonders if this means Huckabee believes in an anything-goes God as well:
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Wait, “the living god”? Wouldn’t that be some kinda wishy-washy progressive modernist God? I figured Huck for a strict constructionist God, an eye-for-an-eye guy who meant every word of Leviticus when he spake it. “Living God” implies some kind of dynamic, changing God, probably soft on crime, the kind of warm, fuzzy God from whom Words emanate with penumbrae..
In the ensuing discussion, Grumer writes, "I'm just amused by the fact that the adjective 'living' seems to imply diametrically opposite things when you apply it to 'God' or 'Constitution.'"
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That's astute. The same could be said of the evangelical idiom "the living Word of God" as a reference to the Bible. "Living" there certainly doesn't mean all the wanton things they take it to mean in the phrase "living Constitution." But I don't want to get bogged down in the legal and legalist lit-crit, what I'm interested in here is what this phrase "living God" means.
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When a Southern Baptist preacher like Mike Huckabee speaks of "the living God," what he means is that God is active, busy, involved in the world, even that God intervenes in the lives of people and the affairs of nations. That's not in itself an unusual claim for us Christian types to make. I would probably disagree with Huckabee as to the extent and content and intent of that divine involvement, as well as over our capacity for understanding it (there's that effing ineffability again), but I wouldn't object to the use of the phrase "living God." What it means, essentially, is that he is not a Deist.
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I should caution, however, that I'm not entirely confident in my ability to translate Huckabee's evangelical-speak because I'm not entirely confident that he isn't using a different kind of dog whistle -- one to which my evangelical ears are not attuned.
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Bush's dog-whistle code-words were designed to appeal to evangelical Christian voters without scaring away everyone else. Huckabee isn't doing that -- he employs evangelical idioms without any apparent regard for how it sounds to those unfamiliar with it. But Huckabee may also be employing his own set of vague allusions to appeal to a particular subset of evangelical types without scaring away the rest of the people in the pews. Over at Daily Kos, dogemperor makes the case that Huckabee admires Bill Gothard. Huckabee has even proudly noted that he has been through Gothard's "Basic Seminar."
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Gothard is not well-known outside of his particular fiefdom, but Huckabee's expressed admiration for him -- and Gothard's attendance at a Houston fundraiser for the candidate -- is deeply disturbing. You know how, say, Christopher Hitchens gets a case of the howling fantods any time he hears anyone from the religious right speak? That's how most evangelicals respond to Bill Gothard. At the fundamentalist Baptist, and very Republican, church I grew up in Gothard's seminars were often criticized as a "cult."
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It may simply be that, as a politician, Huckabee is willing to accept support from anyone who is willing to offer it. I haven't heard any reports that Huckabee's daughter has been ordered to remain single until age 30, after which she would be allowed to marry only with her father's permission (yes, that really is something the Gothardites I've encountered believe), or any other indications that the former governor is truly a Gothard devotee. So his praise of Gothard and the Basic Seminar might just be a politician's flattery -- just as his praise for the World's Worst Books after receiving Tim LaHaye's endorsement might not mean he's a full-blown prophecy maniac. But both of these instances give me pause. Huckabee talks like a run-of-the-mill evangelical, but if he's really a fan of both LaHaye and Gothard, then he may be something very different and far more troublesome.
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* Many evangelicals seem to think that the division of Proverbs into 31 chapters was divinely inspired as a sign that we should read a chapter of this book every day. That entails skipping the final chapter five months out of the year -- nothing against Lemuel, but hey, he's no Solomon, you know? Contemporary evangelical piety might be a very different thing if the book of Ecclesiastes had also been divided into 31 chapters.
** I've kept one of these pocket-sized volumes in the glove compartment of my car ever since the day I found myself unexpectedly at a hospital bedside needing, but not having with me, the 23rd Psalm, and Psalm 139, and Romans 8, and 1 Corinthians 15. It turns out it's also a good thing to keep in one's glove compartment because troopers tend to look closely at everything you're pulling out of there when they ask to see your registration and proof of insurance.
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Caitlin Wall at FP's Passport blog posts How to speak Huckabee... Insightful variations on the same theme.
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As I watched Mike Huckabee's speech from Arkansas Tuesday night, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that he was speaking in some sort of code.
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Not all of Huckabee's images are biblical. Here he sends a message in Sportstalk:
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Now, it's tough for this old Razorback to say things like 'Roll, tide roll,' but I'm doing it tonight. And it's tough for this old Razorback to look over there to the state just to the east of us and anticipate being able to say that we're too, Volunteers. I think before the night is over, I'll even be singing 'Rocky Top.' This old razorback may even catch some bulldog fever before the night is over. And we're going to forget all about the Cotton Bowl and even be grateful for our friends to the north before tonight night is over, I'm fully believing."
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Huckabee is tapping the rich lexicon of southern college football to highlight his decisive win in Arkansas and herald his strong showings in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri. He ultimately took home all of the above, save the Show Me state.
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Translation: I am from Arkansas, but I also won Alabama and probably took Tennesee, Georgia, and maybe even Missouri.
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It's no accident that Southerners do well in politics, especially if they have a good foundation in religion. It is their birthright to say one thing and mean several without saying so...and get away with it.I have come across observations that Barack Obama speaks in poetry while Hillary Clinton speaks in prose. How can I say this without sounding racist? Obama's oratorical gifts derive in part from his insights into black preaching that is the best of Southern poetry. He therefore shares a gift like Huckabee's that Mrs. Clinton does not have. She may have gone to Vacation Bible School, but it doesn't seem to have worked.
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