Fear with a capital "F," was used as an incredible propaganda tool in the days and weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Milking the "fear factor' proved so useful to the Bush administration as it prepared to launch its Global War on Terror and future invasion of Iraq by scaring Americans into passivity.

It should never be forgotten just how close to the surface, how easily flushed from cover "Fear" can be.

Given the right circumstances, which could easily enough arrive in 2008 on the wings of terror, via American planes heading Iran-wards, or in ways as yet unimaginable.

No one has offered as stunning a vision of how this all worked after 9/11 as Susan Faludi in her remarkable new book, The Terror Dream, Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.

No one has offered anything like the stunning description and analysis of just what dreams and terrors the deadly duo of al-Qaeda and the Bush administration conjured up from the deepest reaches of American consciousness.

When al-Qaeda played the "terror" card and the Bush Regime cunningly responded with the "rescue" card, it took Americans deep into their cultural past.

Right back to the earliest seventeenth-century bestsellers (captivity narratives of young women taken by Indian raiders on the "frontier" of New England) as well as into a more recent past of cowboy rescuers, the sort who saved helpless young women in the darkened movie theaters of the "Bush generation."

Playing that rescue card was the "second hijacking" of 9/11.

It took Americans from a confrontation with real enemies into a fantasy world that called up the most stereotypical roles in our gender dictionary.

("Welcome to war against an Axis of Injuns to protect the honor of the wimmenfolk.")

It is an amazing, if thoroughly chilling, tale that we are not yet done with. The book is simply riveting, a must-read.

The fantasies conjured up are still wildly, unpredictably at play including in the present, strange presidential campaign that Susan Faludi anatomizes below.

No sooner had Hillary Clinton proceeded from the Democratic presidential debate to a speech at Wellesley College last week than the wailing began.

Barack Obama hit the "Today" show accusing her of playing the "don't pick on me" woman and a chorus line of media pundits denounced her for having hurt the cause of feminism by acting like the injured girl and dealing the "gender card."

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd contended that Clinton was trying to show "she can break, just like a little girl.... If she could become a senator by playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now."

FOX News' Mort Kondracke preached:

"I think it is very unattractive for a general election candidate, who wants to be the Commander in Chief of the free world, to be saying 'They're ganging up on me!' I mean, this is the NFL. This is not Wellesley versus Smith in field hockey."

These indictments were conjured from the slimmest of evidence. Even the New York Times, while "piling on," had to do contortions to pin the victim label on Clinton's comments.

As a November 5th Times article put it: "Mrs. Clinton denies playing the gender card -- at least in the traditional sense of saying that as a woman she should be exempt from the traditional rough-and-tumble of campaigns -- and her remarks on the subject have certainly been oblique."

For oblique, read frustratingly nonexistent. What she did say -- at her alma mater before a whooping and roaring crowd of more than 1,000 young women -- was:

"In so many ways, this all-women's college prepared me to compete in the all-boys' club of presidential politics.... Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it, not now. So let's roll up our sleeves and get to work together. We're ready to shatter that highest glass ceiling."

What about that was so girl-with-her-finger-in-her-mouth frail?

The indignation of Clinton's opponents may have a motive more genuine than their desire to defend feminism. They are mad because they feel robbed.

Clinton, in fact, didn't play the victim card. The gender card she played was the one every successful recent male presidential candidate has played -- the rescuer card.

The Male Prerogative: Rescuing the Damsel in Distress [Original]

Keep in mind: The gender card is always played. It's even played in presidential campaigns where all the candidates are men (or rather, as Kondracke prefers, quarterbacks).

Given the political culture -- and for reasons embedded in our history -- that card usually involves a morality play in which men are the rescuers and women the victims in need of rescuing.

Post-9/11, with the nation facing the constant threat of "savage" attack, the inclination to play the gender rescue card became an imperative -- as was in full evidence during the 2004 presidential campaign.

"Every suburban mother's greatest fear" was now not a black man's mug shot but a Muslim terrorist's, and every suburban mother was recast as a Security Mom.

Victory on Election Day went to the candidate who best understood how to deal from that deck. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry worked hard to position themselves as the King of the Wild Frontier.

Kerry's handlers, however, failed to put into play the female part of the rescue equation.

They counted on the Senator's decorated service in Vietnam to qualify him for the hero role, especially in contrast to Bush's AWOL record. What they were missing was a woman to rescue.

Bush's advisers knew better, as was apparent in their political commercials.

In "Wolves," set in a dark forest invaded by a pack of wolves (read: terrorists), a trembling female voiceover warned voters that Kerry would make cuts in U.S. intelligence "so deep they would have weakened America's defenses -- and weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm."

Kerry, in fact, had no plans to make such cuts, but that hardly registered. "Wolves" engaged America's terror-dream, which the GOP was going to vanquish with a cowboy swagger…. and a commanding daddy "hug."

In the final weeks of the race, Bush's backers unveiled "Ashley's Story," a 60-second commercial featuring the President hugging a teenage girl named Ashley Faulkner, whose mother had died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Ashley -- shown lying in a hammock in her backyard, reading a novel with a Victorian lady on the cover -- says: "He's the most powerful man in the world and all he wants to do is make sure I'm safe."

The $14 million worth of air time purchased made it the single most expensive political ad of the race. Broadcast more than 30,000 times, it achieved saturation level in the crucial swing states.

In Ohio alone, the spot ran 7,000 times, a bombardment intensified by an Internet, phone, and direct-mail campaign that distributed 2.3 million brochures showcasing The Hug.

Exit poll studies later concluded that "Ashley's Story" was critical to the election results.

Political analysts scored it "the most effective ad" of the political season and post-election surveys found it to be one of the two most remembered ads.

Resetting the "Rescue Myth' for 2008

In this election, the gender card has proved harder to play than usual. No one's talking about security moms anymore.

For their part, Democratic candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards have not been running security-scare -- and, by extension, gender-scare -- campaigns.

And the GOP candidates, while playing the security card for all it's worth, have yet to find a way to assign a little Ashley to their twenty-first century John Wayne -- though, no doubt, that will come.

Auditioning to be a Feminist John Wayne

So far, the only person who has a lock on rescuing women is the one female candidate. Accusations that she was promoting herself as a feminine victim were not only ludicrously overplayed, but often outright inaccurate, and in any case missed the point.

Take for instance, ABCNews.com's attempt to give new legs to the victim canard with a November 5th headline:

"Pelosi: Clinton Camp Played Gender Card."

Actually, as a quote in the article made clear, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made the opposite point:

"[Sen. Clinton] said it best: They're 'piling on' -- or whatever the words were -- 'because I'm the front-runner.' That's why they're piling on…. If she was in third place, they wouldn't say, 'Let's go attack a woman.'"

Hillary Clinton's rescue of women departs from the previous male version. In the old model, helpless women were saved from perilous danger by men.

In the new, women are granted authority and agency to rescue themselves. Understanding the distinction is essential to an evaluation of current American politics.

The clash between these two rescue scenarios was on vivid display in late 2001, when President Bush signed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act (before a window-dressing crowd of invited feminists) and declared that "the central goal of the terrorists is the brutal oppression of women."

His concern for women's rights came to a halt, however, as soon as the Taliban was driven from power and Afghanistan was theoretically secured.

"Right now we have other priorities," a senior administration official told the New York Times when asked (only two and a half weeks into the Afghan war) what role women's rights would have in a future government.

"We have to be careful not to look like we are imposing our values on them."

Tellingly, even as the President was trumpeting female oppression as a casus belli and part of his global rescue scenario, his administration was deep-sixing an initiative that would have provided financing for women-run NGOs in Afghanistan.

After all, if women proved capable of fending for themselves, if they laid claim to self-determination instead of violation and dependency, the rescue drama fell to pieces.

The Bush administration was no more inclined to promote female strength at home than overseas; witness the ways it sought to roll back women's progress on many fronts -- from reproductive rights and employment equity to military status.

By hugging girls while trying to gut equal-opportunity programs, the White House was working hard to institute its own cult of victimhood.

But in the end, 1,001 Ashleys couldn't save Bush -- nor the Republicans who will inherit his mantle -- from the electorate's knowledge of his multiple rescue failures, culminating in the image of our Commander-in-Chief playing guitar while the citizens of New Orleans, female and male both, cried for help.

This year, as always, the presidential candidates must contend with the rescue formula, complicated by the fact that Bush has so devalued its currency.

In this climate, Hillary Clinton can do what her male counterparts cannot. She is, indeed, reaching for the gender card -- just as her accusers claim. It's just a different card than they imagine. She is auditioning for the role of rescuer on a feminist frontier.

She returned to Wellesley to tell the female undergraduate "hostages" that she was there to free them; she was there to help them "roll up our sleeves" and "shatter that highest glass ceiling."

As such, she latched onto a crucial element of presidential races past, and possibly to come -- that at the core of all American political rescue fantasies is a young woman in need.

In the general election, whoever the candidates may be, they will be tempted, perhaps required, to show just those bona fides. Clinton may be the only one who can do so without betraying the signature of a disgraced cowboy ethic.

tags: hillary clinton  myth  damsel  distress  rescue  male  

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