McCain Campaign Continues GOP Tactic of Scaring Americans into Voting Republican

More comparisons between the once-maverick presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and President George W. Bush are popping up daily. Now his supporters are trying to scare the American people into voting GOP this November.

In a CBS interview Sunday, McCain supporter Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) predicted an imminent terrorist attack in early 2009. After the threat, Lieberman said of McCain, "He's been tested. He's ready to protect the security of the American people."

This comes on the heels of McCain strategist Charlie Black claiming a terrorist attack would be a "big advantage" to McCain this election cycle.

Black later apologized for the comments. But some may say the damage has been done. In The New York Times last week, two neuroscience experts wrote a fascinating op-ed piece about the political brain.

In it, they talked about misinformation in political campaigns and why it works. Our brains are hardwired to remember stories that accord with our worldview, whether the stories themselves are true or not. Also, we can easily forget who told us information and attribute it to a more credible source. So when politicians and strategists scare the living bejesus out of us with veiled threats of violence, we may perceive the information as coming from someone who is actually involved in protecting our country, not in winning an election.

The article goes on to point out that emotionally salient stories are more likely to be remembered and repeated. That makes the threat of terrorism a particularly significant story to be throwing around like that. What is more emotional than the possible destruction of our country and way of life?

Now, fear as a vote-getter is not a new technique. A study of President Richard Nixon published in Vanity Fair shows he was afraid that if Johnson succeeded in brokering a peace in Vietnam, he wouldn't be able to beat Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election.

John White recently presented a peer-reviewed article at the annual meeting of The Midwest Political Science Association titled Values, Elections, and Terrorism. In it, he compares President Ronald Reagan's use of communism as a political tool to Bush's use of terrorism in his 2004 re-election bid.

And it's also not a tactic limited to U.S. elections. This last weekend, Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe used fear to get his people out to the polls. Since his only opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, dropped out protesting the political violence against his supporters, Mugabe needed high turnout to combat the protests of those who say he's stolen the run-off election. So Mugabe's supporters are forcing people to vote with violent coercion. John Simpson, BBC World News editor wrote from an undercover post in Harare, Zimbabwe:

"Everyone knows that if by tonight they cannot show the tell-tale indelible pink mark on their fingers to indicate that they have voted, they are open to violent retribution."

Maybe that's an unfair parallel to draw. Sure, threatening a terrorist attack if Americans don't vote Republican is much more vague and esoteric than bodily harm to those who don't vote and vote right. But the backwards apologizing for accidental "slips" is an insidious example of Republican reptilian-emotional electoral politics as usual.

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