October 21, 2004 - The audience is carefully selected and the venue dressed with the care of a skilled set designer. The speech for to day is skillfully written to carry the message of today sprinkled with boo cue sound bite shots at the opponent. The execution is superb as the audience, venue, and speech come together seamlessly to produce a thirty second cut to lead the evening news. There is a disappointing sameness to a Bush rally each following the same shooting script. The boos on cue have the hollow quality of a barely rehearsed crowd scene from a B movie devoid of any emotional spontaneity. The boo cue sound bites consist of recycled attacks designed to enhance the viewers unease at the state of America’s security. In their appeals to their intended audience’s fears and their calls to extend the attack they resemble nothing so much as Al Qaeda’s taped messages.

The focus is on terror – on appeals to be terrified of shadowy enemies armed with fearsome weapons and lurking in our cities’ shadows. The Vice-President reprises the theme sounded by Condi Rice in the run-up to the march on Baghdad evoking mushroom clouds blooming over American cities. The President says freedom is on the march in the Middle East even as his Attorney General acts to restrict American liberty at home. Al Zarqawi holed up in Fallujah has replaced Bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora as the President’s primary prey and his primary ally. Without the terrorist bogeymen there is no terror; there is no fear; and there is no message. Their continued liberty is essential to the re-election message.

Neither President Bush nor Vice-President Cheney has offered any program to secure America’s ports against the specter of the mushroom clouds they invoke erupting from an uninspected shipping container. Neither President Bush nor his surrogates on the campaign trail offer any insight into how they propose to disengage from the steady drip of American blood in the Iraqi desert promising instead an open-ended military presence and an endless campaign of Empire in the Middle East.

There is no plan to engage North Korea or Iran, the poles of the President’s Axis of Evil that do possess weapons of mass destruction or the means to manufacture them. Instead the President chooses to engage in the very multilateral diplomatic initiatives that he castigates his opponents for proposing in the case of Iraq. We know, and the hungry tyrant of Pyongyang knows that North Korea is made secure from an American military solution while the United States is caught in a desert swamp. The Mullahs in Teheran know, and we know that so long as we are engaged in Iraq they are free to tip the balance of terror in the Middle East in their direction with their development of a nuclear capacity.

In these closing days the Bush Campaign and its appeal to fear offers no solid solutions but only empty slogans. Victory in its rhetorical war of terror requires that the Islamist terror machine continue its depredations, in Iraq, in Europe, and in the minds of America’s voters. It is a carefully choreographed production staged against a chorus of boos and a background image of painted mushroom clouds.