Cracking the Candidates' Coded Attacks

May 14, 2008 — -- The landscape of this year's election is filled with linguistic pitfalls, and as Sen. Barack Obama has said, "words matter" more than ever before.

Between the 24-hour news cycle and an election in which the two Democratic contenders are a woman and a black man, the language of the candidates, and their surrogates, is carefully parsed by the opposition, the media and the electorate.

In the camps of both Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, high-profile staffers have lost their jobs over comments their bosses found too incendiary.

With so much attention on what is being said -- and in a culture where politically sensitive language has become the mainstream -- candidates disguise their attacks in coded messages intended to pique voters' innate racist, misogynist and ageist prejudices, experts in political communication told ABCNEWS.com.

"What complicates the analyses of these comments is that they use factually true or perfectly innocent language, which nonetheless can be heard to contain a second meaning," said Kathleen Jamieson, a professor of political communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "It also all depends on the cultural context in which the listener is hearing the comment. Meaning is not invariant, it changes based on the assumptions of the listener."

In March, Clinton outwardly denied rumors that Obama was a practicing Muslim. In an interview with "60 Minutes," when asked whether she believed Obama was a Muslim she said: "No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know."

Obama supporters heard something other than a straightforward denial. They heard a coded message, which suggested someone else might know something about his faith that she didn't. When Obama supporters posted the video of Clinton's comments on YouTube, they titled it "Hillary Clinton Stokes False Rumors About Obama's Faith."

"Though she said he was not a Muslim, it was code for maybe he is Muslim," Jamieson said. "It implies, or suggests, that if he was Muslim that would be a problem. Many Muslims ought to be and are offended by that, because it further assumes that Islam equals al Qaeda or terrorism."