Kirk: All right, Mister Spock, what do we have? A creature without form, that feeds on horror and fear, that must assume a physical shape to kill.
Spock: And I suspect preys on women because women are more easily and more deeply terrified, generating more sheer horror than the male of the species.
* * *
Thomas Friedman notices the suddenly elevated levels of fear in the air:
What concerns me most about President Obama’s decision to re-engage in Iraq is that it feels as if it’s being done in response to some deliberately exaggerated fears — fear engendered by YouTube videos of the beheadings of two U.S. journalists — and fear that ISIS, a.k.a., the Islamic State, is coming to a mall near you. How did we start getting so afraid again so fast? Didn’t we build a Department of Homeland Security?
How indeed?
Perhaps because an election is coming and Republicans and their media know that the only way to overcome women's preference for Democrats is to scare the hell out of them:
Suddenly, it feels like 2002. Democrats got creamed in midterm elections that year because the women voters they had relied on throughout the Clinton years deserted them. In 2000, women favored Democratic congressional candidates by nine points. In 2002, that advantage disappeared entirely. The biggest reason: 9/11. In polls that year, according to Gallup, women consistently expressed more fear of terrorism that men. And that fear pushed them toward the GOP, which they trusted far more to keep the nation safe. As then-Senator Joe Biden declared after his party’s midterm shellacking, “soccer moms are security moms now.”
Unfortunately for President Obama, the security moms are back. And as a result, the levee Democrats were counting on to protect against a GOP hurricane is starting to crumble....
As a result of the ISIS beheadings, the percentage of Americans “very worried” about terrorism has just hit a seven-year high. Once again, women are more afraid than men. According to a CNN poll last week, women are 18 points more likely to say they are “very” or “somewhat” worried that someone in their family will be the victim of terrorism. According to Pew, they are six points more likely to call terrorism “very important” to their vote this fall....
In August, white women favored a Democratic Congress by four points. Now they favor a Republican Congress by eight.
And apparently there's not a damn thing Democrats can do about it.
Even though Obama and company are ramping up the hawkishness, military action isn't what will win over these 'Security Moms.' Though they're more fearful of terrorism, women are even less in favor of going after ISIS/ISIL militarily than male voters are.
These voters are falling back, Beinart says, on longstanding and now deeply entrenched stereotypes -- whipped up by right-wing media and reinforced endlessly -- that Democrats are weak and only Republicans are strong.
[T]he chaos in the Middle East and the chaos in Ferguson have fused to create the picture of a frightening, unraveling world. That conflation was a staple of Republican politics in the 1970s and 1980s, when Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan accused liberals of failing to stand up to violent disorder both in the third world and on America’s streets. It proved toxic for Democrats back then, and it’s proving toxic again today.
''
You don't introduce new products in August,'' but now August is over, and the right has begun rolling out its new product, and the product is fear.