There are few sensations in life so wonderful as that special knowledge that you are not afraid, when so many others are. It's a powerful political emotion. There are your countrymen, cowering from the threats of a nuclear Iran and Al Qaeda. Here you are, unwilling to be manipulated. They're with Bush and Hillary and their politics of fear. You're with Senator Obama and his politics of hope.His opposition to the "politics of fear" is one of the Illinois junior senator's main selling points in the primary season. In the South Carolina debates, Mr. Obama said Democrats had to counter the warmonger McCain by standing up and saying, "We've got to overcome the politics of fear in this country." The week before, he accused Hillary Clinton of frightening Democrats by raising the specter of terrorists launching an attack to test an unseasoned president.
As it happens, Mrs. Clinton was referring to the attacks launched in the opening days of Prime Minister Brown's government and thwarted this summer at Glasgow and London. But never mind, Mrs. Clinton was trying to scare voters, and that's just something Mr. Obama won't do.
The phrase, "politics of fear," reemerged from the dustbin of anti-anti-communism on far left Web sites like Alternet in late 2002. In the Cold War, it was employed to deride public school air raid drills, the House's un-American Activities Committee, and Ronald Reagan's anti-red campaigns. Since the end of the Cold War, the phrase has been resurrected by politicians and pundits alike to say the electorate ought to fear the people trying to scare us, not these terrorists and tyrants they keep going on about...
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