Hillary Clinton claims a superior ability to answer the phone in the middle of the night: It’s worse than it sounds.

We are coming to the end of two presidential terms that were super-empowered by the strategic use of fear, without which the second would not even have occurred. Last summer The New Republic revisited that miscarriage:

There was something odd about the support for Bush in places like West Virginia. Unlike voters in New York City, voters in Martinsburg had little to fear from terrorist attacks; yet they backed Bush, while New Yorkers voted for Kerry.

Meanwhile, wearing a lab coat and holding a clipboard:

they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you”; the other required them to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.”

This basically caused them to hang hookers. Then:

the three performed similar experiments to illustrate how awareness of death could provoke worldview defense. They showed that what they now called “mortality salience” affected people’s view of other races, religions, and nations. When they had students at a Christian college evaluate essays by what they were told were a Christian and a Jewish author, the group that did the mortality exercises expressed a far more negative view of the essay by the Jewish author than the control group did. (German psychologists would find a similar reaction among German subjects toward Turks.)

And white-bread Americans considering an inspiring black candidate who is not a Muslim as far as Hillary knows? According to this research, stoking mortal fear would prompt voters to side with Clinton for the worst reasons without them even realizing it. But the Clinton campaign can predict their reaction based on the write-up in TNR. They know that this absurd inquiry into who is “ready” to retaliate before breakfast is psychological warfare in itself. Finally—a candidate who’s abreast of the latest in science!

To constituents of Senator Clinton only the depth and gravity of this duplicity should come as a surprise. Ever since she invaded our state her positions and politics have been a theatre devoid of any principle. She made a great show of courting upstate voters, knowing she wouldn’t win them and didn’t have to but that she looked good on the national stage wearing overalls somewhere near a Great Lake. And after we handed Clinton the scepter she wielded it in the senate as if she actually had been elected by those Republican-voting depressed regions that will never recover unless the Erie Canal becomes relevant again. (And that may happen!)

For example, the city that put her in office and one actually threatened by terrorism was also one of the first places in the country to get back up and regain its senses after September 11th. This is something to be proud of, and yet our supposed New Yorker senator showed no similar sang froid. We questioned the need to react with an authorization of eternal warfare to a president we didn’t elect; Clinton did not. That she was acting that scene for a national audience, and not for her constituents’ interests, is so obvious it’s barely discussed.

On domestic issues of lesser consequence she has been no less rash in distancing herself from the city that put her in office. Remember the “hot coffee mod” for Grand Theft Auto that rocked the nation in 2005? For the first time ever you could buy some software, and then download something from the internet, and subsequently see some pixellated sex on a computer screen! (Uh… we did that in nineteen ninety … two, actually?) For our senator it was an opportunity to go on a crusade to curtail video games. This is not something anyone in New York cared about, other than the need for more sex in video games. But as go focus groups in Ohio, so went Hillary.

To fully appreciate Hillary’s allegiance to imagined cultural archetypes over her actual constituents, consider the address of the company she waged a fake national culture war against:

Rockstar Games
622 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

Silicon alley 10012ers helped put a Clinton from their teenage years back into politics. As a reward she waged an assault on a medium she couldn’t be bothered to understand any better than the remote soccer moms she wanted so badly to please. Thanks for that, Hil.

Oddly enough, the imperiled girl in the ’90s stock footage used for this ad has grown up to be an Obama supporter. Now she’s made her own ad calling into question and even ridiculing Clinton’s use of her image for “the politics of fear.”

And so Clinton returns to the children-in-peril theme, when the chips are down and she needs the vote of every nervous suburbanite she can find. The kids aren’t in soccer anymore, or even in the nest. The Explorer is too expensive to drive. Everything sucks, but hey, death is probably worse. Remind the voters how much terrorists want to kill them and someone else’s sleeping children, then let a psychological flight to the familiar do the dirty work. Who cares that research has shown provoking mortal fear can incite a racist instinct?—Just liberals, probably!

There is one good thing about this tactic: it makes Obama different again. The strongest case for Obama is that he brings in a new kind of politics, in several ways. He’s got supporters that are younger and more diverse, and an exceedingly broad donor base. He’s engaging people on the web and through (frequent!) e-mails. He’s not making a bunch of ridiculous promises or pandering to calcified voting blocs. He is asking people to make sacrifices. He is serious about lobbyists. He is brave enough to use the expression “fear mongering.”

That’s all pretty hot and exciting. What isn’t is his language that chastises “Washington” and “politics as usual.” We’ve heard that a hundred times from a hundred candidates (most of them Republican). Of course changing “politics as usual” is exactly what he’s trying to do, but using that hackneyed phrase only reminds us how many times the hope of changing those politics has been false.

Traditional “politics as usual” scolds rail against a set lifeless, timeworn cliches. “Tax and spend” legislation. Catering to “special interests.” Being “sophisticated.” Their decrying these things is not game changing—It is game playing. Unfortunately, this is the box Obama fell into when he tried to win a state he couldn’t win. He hammered at the Washingtonian Hillary who was there when NAFTA went into effect and who has since defended it. Never mind that the agreement was necessary at the time and is not the real trade problem—you’ll pry that scapegoat from the cold, unemployed hands of Ohio voters.

In attacking Hillary on NAFTA, Obama charged into a territory of hypocrisy he had previously avoided. Thoughtful observers knew immediately that he was selling out his intellectual honesty in doing so, but what choice did he have? Everybody knows you have to win Ohio. It wasn’t long before some disappointed or conniving Canadian soul leaked assurances from the Obama campaign that in the next debate he would take “heavy swings” at NAFTA but “don’t take it seriously” because “it’s just campaign rhetoric.” (Hillary’s campaign made the same reassurances but no one cared because it was not surprising.)

The devastating thing about those quotes is that they are loudly and clearly the voice of our Barack Obama. Their accuracy will never be known, because the international incident was as embarrassing for the Canadian government as it was for any candidate. But it doesn’t matter because whether or not Obama said the words, he was thinking them. We know him well enough to know that. Instead of thinking them and possibly speaking them to Canadians, he should have said them to Americans. He should have explained that Hillary has been wildly inconsistent on NAFTA, and in Ohio she is taking heavy swings at trade and making impossible promises to reverse global trends instantly, just like she promised and failed to deliver in upstate New York, but that she isn’t being serious and it’s just her campaign rhetoric.

Oh well, too late for that now! Obama listened to the devil on his left shoulder; the indignant angel on his right chugged a Molson and let slip the truth. Moving on, it’s time for the campaign—not just the official campaign but the internet movement behind it—to get back to basics. Cast out the demons, stand upon principles, and nail Hillary on the fear mongering. She’s using tactics that won Bush reelection after he demonstrated failure in his first term. Tactics that have permitted an expansion of government power and surveillance, the full extent of which is still unknown. Tactics that are just plain terrible for a free society.

New York recovered from its terrorism shell shock years ago, and the rest of the country is ready to follow—under the right leadership. As usual the lastest New York bomb scare was covered more frantically by the national than local press, but even the refresh-mongering cnn.com let it slide out of its headlines after only 24 hours. New York is leading by example, except for its stepchild junior senator, and the country is ready to wake up from its stupor. We need someone to play Reveille.

It may be the dark of night in the Clinton dynasty, but it’s almost dawn in Obama country.