...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

First fear: The Wall Street implosion couldn’t have come at the better time for the Bambi-boosters. It has allowed the likes of Timothy Garton Ash, for example, to refocus attention on economic matters, and even resurrect the Clintonian observation—the one he rode all the way to the White House—that “it’s the economy, stupid.” Of course, that was back in the heady days when, stupidly, we thought a faltering economy was the scariest thing in the world. We have since discovered there are things far scarier than a blip in the Dow Jones.

Not to Garton Ash, though. He’s convinced it’s “the economy, stupid” is Bambi’s ticket to victory (since, obviously, “it’s the sharia, stupid,” isn’t going to do him any good). The Utopian Tim is hoping Americans will be “smart” enough (heh) to embrace the Clintonian fear and vote Bambi. From the Guardian (the piece also appears in the Globe and Mail):

…(T)he political conclusion seems to me to be clear. If you think the economy is the most important issue in this election - which nearly two-thirds of those asked say they do, while less than a quarter name Iraq - and if you are a rational punter, then your rational choice would be to give the Democrats a chance of doing better than the Bush administration has done.

If people vote with their heads, that is. But people often vote with other parts of their anatomy (heart, gut - choose your organ). And there's a deeper politics of fear that runs against Obama. This is not about facts and policies, but about perceptions, characters, stories, dreams - about feelings that men and women only half-recognise and rarely confess. Yes, that includes race. In a CBS-New York Times poll in July, only 5% of white voters acknowledged that they would not vote for a black candidate, but 24% said America wasn't ready to elect a black president. But it also involves the whole otherness, newness, complexity of him.

Obama, a child of the world as it is, offers a dream of the world as it might be. (That's why so much of the world thrills to him, and will be devastated if he loses.) McCain, Vietnam hero, and Palin, hockey mom, offer a dream of the US as it once was. Rational this may not be, but voters who are fearful, defensive, and unhappy with the way the world is going, may just prefer to hunker down with the reassuring familiarity of that vision of America. "Got hope?" challenges the Obama bumper sticker. At the moment, America has got fear. And the temerity of fear may yet defeat the audacity of hope.

Similarly, the audacity of fear may yet defeat the temerity of hope, or something like that, as Americans go with their “gut” and decide that, in today’s fraught, fractious, fear-replete world, it makes no sense to hand “a child”—a Utopian dreamer—the reigns of power.

Update: A lim for Tim:

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:33 | link | comments

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