Do you hear that?
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
--Sarah Palin Augst 7, 2009
That's probably because you weren't supposed to hear it. Others were.
This is pure Dogwhistle Theater of the most evocative sort.
This is designed to pit the pretty white woman defending her white male child from the big evil black man. There is perhaps no symbolism more infuriating to the racist psyche than that image. Go back to some earlier forms of this symbol to see what I mean.
First, the so called "Anti-Miscegenation Laws" were the direct result of white racist male fears of black men coupling with white women. Though white males had been raping black women for centuries on this continent, nothing was more loathed by the racists than the idea of a black man fathering a child with a whte woman. 41 of the 50 states had some form of an anti-miscegenation law on the books during the history of this nation.
This goes to the very core of racism in America.
Second, in entertainment, the basic premise of the fear of miscegenation was depicted in The Birth of a Nation. The blatant racism depicted in that film as normal, alng with the fears of miscegenation are a part of the history of racism in this nation.
For those reasons it is clear to me, Sarah Palin ius engaging in direct and blatant Dogwhistle Theater. This started in the campaign (c.f. the Palin rallies) and it will not let up any time soon.
Palin is playing to the Southern Strategy base of the GOP. Dogwhistles are her greatest weapon because these people will eat up the evoation of a white woman fighting the "evil black man" to sace her white male baby. For this reason, Sarah Palin will have the base of the GOP on her side during their primaries in 2012.