Barack Obama and the politics of hope

Almost seven years after Arab terrorists hijacked American passenger jets and rammed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the looming presence of fear associated with September 11 still haunts our politics. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident recently than in the lingering Islamophobia that has infected both sides of our presidential campaign.

Obama's Faux Pas

Last week we learned that Obama campaign workers would not allow two Muslim women with headscarves to be seated behind the candidate's podium at a recent Michigan rally. Then the New York Times reported today that Rep. Keith Ellison, the country's first Muslim congressman, volunteered to speak for Obama at a mosque in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last December, but the event was canceled because "it might stir controversy." As an aide to Obama told Ellison, "We have a very tightly wrapped message."

Months later, as the campaign progressed, Ellison was once again forced to cancel plans to campaign for Obama, this time in North Carolina, after he was told the state was "too conservative."

Is there any wonder that some Muslims are feeling a little frustrated with the Obama campaign right now?

I suspect that some Obama campaign advisers are probably more worried about offending the vast Islamophobic non-Muslim community than they are about offending the much smaller group of Muslim voters in the U.S. Maybe that's why Obama has appeared in churches and synagogues this campaign but no mosques, although the campaign is quick to note that the candidate and his aides have met with Muslim leaders.

But here's the problem. A recent poll found 10 percent of Americans still think Obama is a Muslim, and his campaign is certainly aware of this misperception. Conventional wisdom says Obama should stay away from anything that might possibly read Muslim. As a veteran of presidential campaigns, I get it. But the conventional wisdom is as understandable as it is wrong, and it needs to be challenged.

Obama's Opportunity

Barack Obama's greatest strength as a candidate is the prospect that he can help unite our country after years of division. The perception that the Obama campaign doesn't want the candidate to be seen with any group of loyal Americans undermines that message.

Who is better than Barack Obama, the son of Christian and Muslim parents, from a white mother and a black father, to deliver a message of unity that can help our nation heal the wounds left by years of President Bush's cowboy mentality? Obama is, in many ways, the perfect messenger to communicate the importance of political, racial and religious tolerance that our country desperately needs.

But politics is politics, and political advisers are notoriously risk-averse creatures. In this case, they're wrong. The Muslim issue is not a burden but an opportunity. It allows Senator Obama to demonstrate a new style of leadership that appeals to our hopes instead of our fears. He's done it before, as when he courageously said the U.S. should be willing to talk with our political enemies, or when he refused to embrace the gimmicky "gas tax holiday" to pander to primary voters frightened by $4 a gallon fuel costs.

But the forces of fear do not like change. Despite volumes of evidence that the status quo has failed us miserably throughout the Bush Administration, the fear mongers will try to convince us that any change from the status quo is a sign of weakness. They cannot be allowed to win.

Building bridges between divided communities doesn't make Barack Obama weaker as a candidate; it makes him stronger. And including all Americans into the fold of the American dream doesn't make our country weaker; it makes us stronger too.

The Politics of Fear

But fear is the lifeblood of the Republican Party these days. We saw that clearly on Monday, when a senior adviser to Senator John McCain was quoted in Fortune Magazine saying that a future terror attack in the United States might help McCain's campaign.

The startling prediction, by McCain's chief strategist Charlie Black, assumes that John McCain "wins" whenever the debate turns to national security. As proof, he points to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December as an example of an "unfortunate event" that reminded GOP voters of McCain's national security credentials and helped the Arizona senator win the New Hampshire primary.

McCain's "knowledge and ability to talk about [Pakistan] reemphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us," Black told Fortune. Then, when asked how McCain would benefit from a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Black admits candidly: "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him."

After the story broke, McCain said he "strenuously" disagreed with Black and Black himself later apologized. But The Financial Times acknowledged that Black simply "put into words what many Republicans and Democrats have privately been stating for months."

The conventional wisdom assumes that a terrorist attack would help McCain against a supposedly "untested" Obama, but once again the fear-based conventional wisdom needs to be challenged. 

For the past seven years, Republicans have been going around bragging that they're the only party that can keep us safe. As proof, they point out that there hasn't been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.

That's a dubious argument, but if that's the standard, then a new terrorist attack would undermine the argument that the Republicans have kept us safe. The Republicans can't have it both ways. They can't take all the credit for keeping us "safe" from a terror attack for seven years and then take none of the blame if and when a terrorist attack does happen.

The Democrats should never have let the GOP politicize 9/11 in the first place, but they certainly can't let them continue to own the issue. President Bush has mined the September 11 story for seven years of political gain, but the attack itself was actually another in the long line of failures of the Bush Administration.

Along with the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, the failed intelligence that led to the Iraq War and the failed execution of that war, the 9/11 attack demonstrated once again that George W. Bush was asleep at the switch, ignoring a crucial CIA memo a month before the incident that warned him that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack in the U.S.

The Politics of Hope

If the rise of Barack Obama means anything, it represents the beginning of the end of a corrosive politics of fear that has been practiced and perfected by the Republican Party for the past 40 years.

Ever since President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Republican Party has used fear tactics to acquire and maintain power by lining up one enemy after another.

First it was the blacks. Then the antiwar protesters and the feminists. Then the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union. Then the "San Francisco liberals" and the "Massachusetts liberals" and the "card-carrying members of the ACLU" who wanted to destroy our way of life. Then came the gays who wanted to destroy the sanctity of marriage.

And now it's the Muslims who supposedly want to destroy us. But after 40 years of fear, what have we accomplished from all this? Our military is bogged down in two costly wars, our economy is in ruins, and millions of Americans still don't have jobs or health insurance. Our schools are crumbling, our bridges are collapsing, our homes are being taken away from us, and we can't afford to put gas in our fuel tanks or bread on our tables.

It's no wonder that eight out of 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. The jig is up on the politics of fear. Even after their stunning defeats in the 2006 midterm elections and three successive losses in special elections this year, the Republicans are still playing the same old political games that have failed our country and are now starting to fail their party.

Barack Obama is not the savior. No one candidate will ever be. But he is the best hope we have right now to end the politics of fear and replace them with the politics of hope.