Tomgram: Susan Faludi, Hillary Clinton and the Rescue Card

Whatever fears Americans have at the moment -- and with oil heading into the once unimaginable $100-a-barrel range and the housing market in freefall, fears are not unreasonable -- they do not add up to Fear with a capital "F," as in the days and weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. They do not add up to the kind of abject fear that proved so useful to the Bush administration as it prepared to launch its Global War on Terror and future invasion of Iraq by scaring Americans into passivity.

As Mark Danner wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times, war is a godsend for politicians, "for glowing at its heart is that most lucrative of political emotions: fear. War produces fear. But so too does the rhetoric of war." Right now, that rhetoric -- specifically the fear of terrorism -- is not much at the forefront of American minds. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that a modest 17% of Republicans and a vanishingly small 3% of Democrats put "terrorism" among their top two concerns. This may be one reason why the leading Republican candidates, with little to offer and saddled with seven years of George Bush, are so over the top on potentially fear-inducing subjects like war with Iran.