What The Heck Are Dog-Whistle Politics?

John McCain's recent TV ads comparing Barack Obama to vacuuous white bimbettes Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, among other things, are examples of dog-whistle politics.

Dog whistles are built in such a way that humans cannot hear them due to their high frequency, but dogs can. Similarly, dog-whistle politics uses coded language that appears to mean one thing to most people but has a more specific meaning for targeted subgroups, in McCain's case racists and Evangelicals, among others.

Not surprisingly, the term was coined by those great namers of things, the Aussies, and emerged in the mid 1990s when it was used to describe the efforts of the government of Prime Minister John Howard to crack down on illegal immigration by appealing to voters with racist leanings without using overtly racist language.

By the way, it worked.