Giuliani, Obama & The Politics of Fear

by Laura Snedeker

“If one of them gets elected, it sounds to me like we’re going on the defense,” presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani said of his Democratic opponents. “We’re going to cut back on electronic surveillance. We’re going to cut back on interrogation. We’re going to cut back, cut back, cut back, and we’ll be back in our pre-September 11 mentality of being on defense."

Rising to the challenge, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) released a statement condemning Giuliani’s indictment of the Democratic Party.

“Rudy Giuliani today has taken the politics of fear to a new low and I believe Americans are ready to reject those kinds of politics," the senator and Democratic presidential hopeful noted.

Pretty words, Barack, but I must disagree. It’s nice to think that Americans won’t get fooled again by Republican warnings of imminent annihilation upon a Democratic victory, but it’s more likely that Americans are fed up with a corrupt and incompetent administration rather than prepared to do away with the “politics of fear” as a fixture of debate.

Remember that back in 2003, 69 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in 9/11. As of just last year, 59 percent believed that if Iran were developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) it would use them against the United States, with 80 percent convinced Iran would hand them over to terrorists.

That neither a secular Iraqi regime nor a Shi’ite theocracy has much in common with Sunni extremists doesn’t seem to matter. And never mind that nuclear weapons are mainly used as a deterrent anyway.

Obama, for all his (relative) youth, is not really so naïve as to think that media manipulation and the American embrace of ignorance are not factors in politics. The idea that Americans will reject “the politics of fear” is extremely flattering. Obama casts himself as both a strong, realistic politician and as a man who respects the intelligence of American citizens.

Obama should know something about manipulating public opinion. A political nobody when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, he became the party's rising star and the media’s golden boy. He’s served less than one term in the Senate, and yet he’s going to bring America together again, as if division were the problem itself and not the result of unpopular policies. Countries are not divided for petty reasons.

In an interview with The Chicago Tribune in 2004, Obama said that if economic sanctions did not persuade Iran to give up its (hypothetical) WMD program, his “instinct would be to err on not having those weapons in the possession of the ruling clerics of Iran." His willingness to attack Iran has been all but forgotten by most liberals.

“We know we can win this war based on shared purpose, not the same divisive politics that question your patriotism if you dare to question failed policies that have made us less secure,” Obama said later.

This sort of uplifting, faux-idealistic speech is a placeholder for an articulated policy. What is our shared purpose? Victory in the so-called War on Terror? The defeat of al-Qaeda? The capture of Osama bin Laden? The complete and total elimination of terrorism anywhere and everywhere in the entire world?

Giuliani’s implication that the Democrats would make America less safe is despicable, as is his tacit endorsement of domestic spying and interrogation. We have a choice between a mystery man and an autocrat. Is it any wonder that we vote against politicians and not for them?

(The cartoon is from radicalgraphics.org, which offers its material for free.)

politics
Rudolph Giuliani
Barack Obama
War on Terror
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