The Politics of Fear in a Season of Campaigning  Martha Ellen
Stortz  “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” As he stood
in the Ellipse that wintry day, my father-in-law remembers that
the only thing he was really afraid of was frostbite. But I am
not worried about the weather. What concerns me is how far this
country has traveled from Roosevelt’s insight. Fear has become
the lingua franca of this campaign. No robust sense of hope
challenges fear in this political season. Rather pundits market
it; politicos manipulate it; and the electorate is left in a
terminal state of anxiety, waiting for the next shoe to drop. On
November 2nd, we won’t vote our party or our values; we won’t
even vote our head or our heart. We’ll vote our fears, and
whichever candidate manipulates them most cleverly will have
won. The political fall-out of this politics of fear is three-
fold: manipulation, incantation, and enemies.  First, fear is
easy to manipulate. If one measures the relative bounce from the
party conventions this s