William Kristol: “I recommend to Senator Clinton the politics of fear”

This entry was posted by harry s truman on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 12:22 pm.

I had to post this amazing clip. About 20 seconds in, conservative New York Times columnist and Fox News regular William Kristol gives a lagging Hillary Clinton advice on how to burst the Obama bubble: “The way to puncture euphoria is with…fear…and I recommend to Senator Clinton the politics of fear.”

Never has this oft-used tactic been made so explicit by a conservative, and Haper’s Contributor Scott Horton sums it up nicely:

“The key that Hillary can use to take down Barack Obama, says this political analyst, is ‘the politics of fear.’…[Kristol] is convinced that fear-mongering works very effectively in a democratic society…here is what [Edmund] Burke had to say about the tactics of fear:

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear…Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye.

“Fear is employed to cripple reason, to enslave, to craft tyrannical rule, [Burke] says. Fear is not a tool that a democratic state uses on its own people. This is a simple, fundamental, vital point. And Kristol exposes a crude cynicism…I propose that we keep on top of Mr. Kristol. Let’s open a ‘Ministry of Fear Watch…’”