| The Ottawa Citizen
Friday, January 23, 2009, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen. |
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Barack Obama's politics of fear. In a database of media stories, the phrase "politics of fear" appears 482 times in the 15 years between 1985 and 2000. In the eight years between 2000 and today, it comes up 2,101 times. Fear was Karl Rove's multi-purpose Swiss army knife. He used it to win control of Congress, to sell a war, to get George W. Bush re-elected. But by constantly using fear to advance his boss's interests, Rove was like a pitcher with a killer fastball and not much else. People started to figure him out. This is when the "politics of fear" meme started to proliferate. By 2007, Americans were so sick of fear-mongering politics that Joe Biden could devastate Rudy Giuliani with a joke about terrorism. (Every sentence Giuliani utters contains three things, Biden said. A noun, a verb, and 9/11.) Now the president is a man renowned for uplifting rhetoric and the days of mushroom-cloud warnings are history. It seems the "politics of fear" has been discredited and pushed to the margins. It's tempting to think it may never return. In fact, it never went away. And it never will. Consider this warning, which was delivered by an American politician at a major rally last year: "There are 30,000, 40,000 hard-core jihadists who would be perfectly happy to strap on a bomb right now, walk in here and blow us all up." Pretty inflammatory stuff. It sounds like Bush on a bad day. Or maybe Rudy Giuliani. But those words are Barack Obama's. He said them in response to a question about how the Republicans use the politics of fear. And that is far from the only hyped-up comment Obama has made about terrorism. In a Democratic debate, Obama outdid every Republican when he declared -- twice! -- that his top priority as president would be to "lock down loose nuclear weapons that are still floating out there." On the economy, too, Obama has been making careful use of fear.
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"We start 2009 in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime," he said in a major economic speech delivered Jan. 8. "Nearly two million jobs have been lost, and on Friday we are likely to learn that we lost more jobs last year than at any time since World War Two." At his first press conference after winning the election, Obama declared, "we are facing the greatest economic challenge of our lifetime." And in his soaring victory speech, Obama warned that "the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime -- two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century." This is not merely dramatic language. This is the politics of fear. The worst financial crisis in a century? The central cause of the Great Depression was the collapse of 9,000 American banks. It is absurd to say the current situation is "worse" than that. The worst job losses since the Second World War? That's technically correct, but deeply misleading because the American population has grown massively over the last 60 years. To make meaningful comparisons between the job situation now and in past recessions, we have to look at the rate of job losses, not the absolute number of jobs that were lost. In the 12 months after the start of the current recession, almost two per cent of American jobs were lost. The loss was considerably worse in the recessions of 1981, 1960, 1957, 1953, and 1948. The greatest economic challenge? Not so far, at least. By any measure, the recession of the early 1980s was much worse. Obama's claim that we face "the greatest challenges of our lifetime" is certainly more defensible than the others if only because it is more vague. But what about the Cold War? It would take some amazing hubris to argue that the threat of nuclear annihilation and the struggle against the Soviet Union were mere warm-ups for the tough stuff ahead.
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The calculations behind Obama's selective use of fear aren't hard to figure out. Ever since 9/11, terrorism has been the Republicans' strong suit. If Obama had responded to the question about the politics of fear by denouncing the Republicans for hyping the threat -- which is precisely what he did in the first part of his answer -- the Republicans would have hammered him for being "complacent." So he tacked on that bit about jihadists to provide defensive cover. Obama's motives for fear-mongering on the economy are even more obvious. He wants a mammoth stimulus package. And he wants major change in Washington. A sense that things are dire is useful to his purposes: The worse people perceive the situation to be, the more they will be willing to go big. More strategically, Obama's re-election in 2012 depends on how voters answer Ronald Reagan's famous question: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" One way for Obama to get people to answer "yes" is to play up how good things are in 2012. Another is to play up how horrible things are today. Fear is one of the most potent forces in the human mind. That makes it one of the most potent forces in politics. Every politician knows this. And no politician, not even the most high-minded, will forgo its use entirely. With the Bush administration gone, the phrase "politics of fear" may fade. But human nature does not change, and neither will fear's role in politics. You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen. |
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Copyright © 2005 Dan Gardner |