The Roots of Fear

George W. Bush's media strategists used imagery to evoke fear effectively in the closing weeks of the 2004 campaign when they aired the "wolf" ad. It showed a pack of hungry-looking wolves in a dark forest, apparently about to attack, as a dulcet-toned female voice claimed that "John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations. By $6 billion. Cuts so deep they would have weakened America's defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm." There is no question that raising primal fears of weakness, and scary carnivores with big teeth, pushed voters' fear buttons much more effectively than a straight-on recitation of Kerry's voting record would have.

Words that evoke images rather than abstractions are powerful triggers of fear, too. When making the case for invading Iraq in 2003, Bush asked America to "imagine with me this new fear"—as he raised the specter of the mushroom cloud, as LBJ had. "The key to emotional language is its simplicity and clarity," says Republican pollster Frank Luntz. "It has to be immediately believable and authentic. If it requires you to think, it's less powerful; if it requires you to explain, it's less powerful." The most effective fear-inducing language and images speak to the amygdala, not the cortex.

The "Willie Horton" ad that helped George H.W. Bush win the White House 12 years before his son stands out for its then-pioneering use of images, verbal and visual, to bore its way directly into the electorate's amygdala. Horton was serving a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts when he received a weekend pass from prison. While free, he stabbed a man and raped a woman, something Bush's ad tied to the prison-furlough policies of his opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Brain-scanning techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging show that when whites—including those who profess not to be racist—view black faces, the more Afrocentric the face (darker skin, broader nose, Afro haircut), the more active the amygdala. Showing Horton's face was therefore much more powerful, and a greater incitement to fear, than just talking about him.

Fear fades, of course. Even New Yorkers who ran for their lives as the cloud of debris tore through the streets of the financial district on September 11 don't feel the acute terror they did in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. But memories of profoundly frightening experiences differ from other memories in a way that candidates can exploit. Most memories come with a date stamp, telling us when the event occurred. But when we store a terrifying memory, that mechanism fails. As a result, when we recall the memory, the event feels recent or even as if it were happening in the present. That's good news for Giuliani. He regularly invokes September 11, telling audiences that another attack is a virtual certainty ("I think probably the way I have to say it is, when we're attacked") and using vivid imagery to bring listeners back to that day. One of his fund-raisers in California asked supporters to contribute $9.11. (The campaign disavowed that ploy but did not return the money.)

Candidates who rely on crude scare tactics may be in for a surprise, however. New research has brought a more nuanced understanding of the power of fear: it can drive voters away from the protective authority figures who seem like its logical beneficiaries. Just days before Spanish voters went to the polls in March 2004, terrorists linked to Al Qaeda bombed four trains in Madrid, killing 191 people. Until then, polls had shown the ruling Conservatives leading their Socialist challengers. But when the ballots were counted, the Socialists had won, not the hard-liners who had enlisted in the U.S. War on Terror by sending troops to Iraq. That outcome reflected, in part, what happens when voters are reminded of the inevitability of death even by something as seemingly innocuous as passing a funeral cortege, let alone by 191 murdered commuters. That reminder makes people "go to ground" psychologically. That is, they become more committed to and identify more strongly with something that will endure long after they are gone. That can be an ideology, or it can be a larger entity such as one's nation, ethnicity or religion. In Spain, enough voters retreated to a Eurocentric, nationalistic world view opposing America's invasion of Iraq to tip the electoral balance.

Americans got their own brutal reminder of mortality before the 2004 election, but in this case American nationalism benefited the authority figure who had most effectively positioned himself as the nation's protector. In the final days of the race, most polls showed Kerry leading Bush by about 2 percentage points nationally and edging ahead in such key states as Ohio (50-46), Florida (49-45) and Iowa (48-47, according to the CNN/Gallup poll). On the Friday before voters went to the polls, however, the Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera broadcast excerpts from a videotape of Osama bin Laden speaking into the camera to Americans, proudly taking responsibility for September 11 and patronizingly explaining "the best way to avoid another Manhattan." Clips of the diatribe were broadcast repeatedly on American stations over the weekend and described in newspapers. Four days later, the president won re-election. Ohio, Florida and Iowa put him over the top. "When we're insecure, we want our leaders to have what's called an 'unconflicted personality'," says political psychologist Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. "Bush was very clear in his beliefs and had no doubts, but Kerry was painted as a flip-flopper. Bush had another key advantage: he emphasized the greatness of the nation." Voters whose fears of terrorism were reignited by the bin Laden tape, and who reacted by seeking solace in an entity that would survive their own inevitable demise, found it in the idea of a strong, enduring America as promised by Bush.