The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [129]
As Josef Joffe, editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit, noted in an op-ed in the Washington Post, “The demand for security is like an obsession, spreading relentlessly, for which there is no rational counterargument. DHS always asks, ‘What if?’—which always trumps ‘Why more?’”59
Americans have paid, Joffe suggests, what he dubs a “fear tax” in the form of hundreds of millions of potentially productive hours lost in security lines; freight delays at borders, ports, and airports; and lost revenues and opportunities from abroad. As an example of the latter, Joffe cited a survey of international travelers that examined factors behind the 17 percent decline in overseas visitors to the United States in the five years following 9/11. The largest factor: a perception that U.S. policies made international visitors feel unwelcome. Seventy percent of respondents said they worried about how they’d be treated by U.S. immigration officers.
The total cost of the Bush administration’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks will be the subject of reflection for decades to come. Surely the heaviest toll was paid by the tens of thousands of American, Iraqi, and Afghan soldiers and civilians who were killed or seriously wounded, and by their families, and the trillions of dollars the United States spent is hardly trivial. Harder to measure are the losses in civil liberties from the USA Patriot Act. Signed into law by President Bush in October 2001, the act gave broad surveillance powers to intelligence agencies. (To those who protested the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft warned back then, “Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity.... They give ammunition to America’s enemies.”)60
Enter Barack Obama
A fear campaign can eventually become sufficiently stale and suspect that adept politicians benefit from challenging it. By the time of the presidential election of 2008, frustration with the administration, its terror scares, and its war in Iraq opened the door for a presidential candidate who had opposed the war from the start and held out promises of a brighter future. Republicans yammered on about how “the terrorists” hoped the Democrat would win, and Barack Hussein Obama’s full name (emphasis on Hussein) was pointedly used at rallies for presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, who claimed that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.”61
During the campaign, Obama refused to take the bait. While he never opened himself to charges of being weak or reckless by downplaying the risks of terrorism—or for that matter, other overblown frights I’ve discussed—Obama deftly mounted a campaign of optimism whose byword was hope.
His election was hopeful not just on issues, but in one important regard, in its outcome as well. The election of an African American offered real hope that large numbers of Americans had put aside the long-entrenched fears of black men that I discussed in chapter 5.
It would be a mistake to presume, however, as did a range of commentators after the 2008 presidential election, that prejudice played little or no role in that contest. Obama beat his Republican challenger decisively in the general election—by a 7-point margin. But among white voters, he lost to McCain, and by a still wider margin—12 points. Nationally, 43 percent of the white electorate voted for Obama, and in some states in the Deep South, only about one in ten whites voted for him (10 percent in Alabama and 11 percent in Mississippi).62