Fear of the Other in Campaign 2008

Maybe it’s just me reading too much into it, but I am currently aghast at the level of fear mongering vis-à-vis the "Other" that going on right now in the Republican presidential primary campaign. Case in point: Mitt Romney’s recent quote, “Actually, just look at what Osam — uh — Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. That is the central place, he said. Come join us under one banner.”

In this gaffe (or Freudian slip—call it what you like), Romney’s fear of the Other is laid bare. The Democrats—personified by a black man and a woman—are bent on destroying America from the inside (the internal other) while the jihadists target America from the outside (the external other). The irony is that even if this was a mistake (I am sure it was), it is not a departure from the general tone of the Republican discourse as the candidates prepare for January in Iowa.

I listened to Sunday’s Republican debate in its entirety only to hear former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani “softly” threaten Putin with his “big stick” (the phallic undertones need not be explored here) to thunderous applause. This while Ron Paul was booed for suggesting that the PKK terrorism is a Turkish issue and should be left to Ankara to solve (after the Hispanophobe Tancredo eviscerated Speaker Pelosi over the Armenian resolution).

To believe the Republicans, Iran is bent on world domination and capable of projecting its imaginary missiles at Finland (thus the universal approval of magical missile defense in “Czechoslovakia” wherever—or should I say whenever—that is). China and India were both held up as nefarious economic and demographic bogeys lurking on the other side of the globe, but insidiously near in the deterritorialized world of call centers and cheap shipping containers. Even the generally even-handed Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee threatened America with the specter of a bunch of “old hippies” (the late 1960s internal other) finding out their drugs are free under “HilaryCare.”

Let’s hope this frightfest is simply part of an “October surprise” by the Republicans, and that after Halloween, the politics of the real rather that politics of the preposterous seeps back in to the Red campaign.