Frank Rich: Five Years After 9/11, Fear Finally Strikes Out

Frank Rich is back and he gleefully reports that Karl Rove's favorite campaign theme has finally died a well deserved death.

--The New York Times, August 20, 2006

The results are in for the White House's latest effort to exploit terrorism for political gain: the era of Americans' fearing fear itself is over.

In each poll released since the foiling of the trans-Atlantic terror plot - Gallup, Newsweek, CBS, Zogby, Pew - George W. Bush's approval rating remains stuck in the 30s, just as it has been with little letup in the year since Katrina stripped the last remaining fig leaf of credibility from his presidency. While the new Middle East promised by Condi Rice remains a delusion, the death rattle of the domestic political order we've lived with since 9/11 can be found everywhere: in Americans' unhysterical reaction to the terror plot, in politicians' and pundits' hysterical overreaction to Joe Lieberman's defeat in Connecticut, even in the ho-hum box-office reaction to Oliver Stone's World Trade Center.