criticized Obama, saying "we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern". Harvard professor (and Obama ally) Charles Ogletree called this attack racist, because the true idea being communicated was "that he's not one of us". MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell called a 2012 speech by Mitch McConnell, in which McConnell criticized Obama for playing too much golf, a racist dog-whistle because O'Donnell felt it was meant to remind listeners of black golfer Tiger Woods, who at the time was going through an infidelity scandal. In 2012, Obama's campaign ran an ad in Ohio that said Mitt Romney was "not one of us". The Washington Post journalist Karen Tumulty wrote: "ironically, it echoes a slogan that has been used as a racial code over at least the past half-century". During the 2016 presidential election campaign and on a number of occasions throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was accused of using racial and antisemitic "dog whistling" techniques by politicians and major news outlets. During the 2018 gubernatorial race in Florida, Ron DeSantis came under criticism for comments that were allegedly racist, saying: "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That is not going to work. That's not going to be good for Florida." DeSantis was accused of using the verb "monkey" as a racist dog whistle; his opponent, Andrew Gillum, was African-American. DeSantis denied that his comment was meant to be racially charged. Italy Roberto Saviano of The Guardian claimed that Italian right-wing politician Giorgia Meloni used the Mussolini-era slogan "God, homeland, family" as a dog-whistle to signal her anti-immigration stance, and in 2019, she used her identity as a dog whistle, proclaiming at a rally: "I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian." Washington Post columnist Philip Bump contended that Meloni has used the term "financial speculators" as a dog-whistle to conceal antisemitism. Criticism Some have argued that it is difficult to tell whether purported dog whistles are in fact dog whistles. Robert Henderson and Elin McCready argue that plausible deniability is a key characteristic of dog whistles. Mark Liberman has argued that it is common for speech and writing to convey messages that will only be picked up on by part of the audience,