There was a time when Democrats talked to you about hope. The sharp editor of The Spectator, Freddy Gray, reminds us in one of his latest columns: Franklin D. Roosevelt even said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."
In 2008, a young, energetic black politician arrived at the White House speaking of hope. Barack Obama's HOPE poster, designed by artist Shepard Fairey, established itself in popular culture as one of the most iconic and successful political campaigns of all time.
Journalist Laura Barton wrote about it in November 2009: "The image's strength lies in its simplicity. Over the past few months, it has acquired the kind of instant recognition of Jim Fitzpatrick's Che Guevara poster and is surely set to grace T-shirts, coffee mugs and the walls of student bedrooms in the years to come."
There was no more powerful message. If the Democrat wins, they said, hope would return to the United States. Obama himself said in 2008: "We choose hope over fear." Faced with the imminence of the presidency in this year's elections being debated again between Donald Trump and Joe Biden (now as incumbent), the Democratic Party has opted for a message contrary to illusion.
"I'm terrified," Michelle Obama said in a podcast last week. "We cannot take democracy for granted," she added, faced with the possibility of a Trump presidency.
Yesterday, on "The View," host Joy Behar asked Vice President Kamala Harris for her opinion on reports of a possible victory for former President Donald Trump in the elections against a weakened Biden. "I'm scared as heck!" Harris responded to Behar. "Which is why I'm traveling our country. You know, there's an old saying that there's only two ways to run for office — either without an opponent or scared."
"So on all of those points, yes, we should all be scared," Vice President Harris insisted.
In this regard, Axios reporter Sareen Hebeshian writes, "the Biden campaign is increasingly presenting the election as an existential threat to democracy if Trump is elected."
Proof of this is that, in every appearance in which Joe Biden speaks about the former president, he refers to him as a destructive threat to democracy in the United States and classifies the MAGA movement as an "extremist force."
In his column in The Spectator, Freddy Gray writes: "In the summer, Obama reportedly told Joe Biden over lunch that the White House was not nearly anxious enough about the very real possibility that Trump might win again. Biden appears to have taken the point on board. Rather than trying to convince Americans that, despite the rising cost of everything, they were all much better off, he went back to his 2020 modus operandi: warning the public that Trump is a wannabe dictator who wants to kill democracy. His latest speeches have been full of dire prophecies about what four more years of Trump might bring."
The problem for Biden, as polls show, is that Americans are frustrated with him, while, in parallel, the popularity of former President Donald Trump is skyrocketing.
According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 64% of Americans disapprove of how Biden has handled the labor issue. Regarding trust in the president's decisions, all indicators have fallen by more than 10 points since 2021.
That Democrats to build their campaign around terror brings them closer to autocrats who rely on fear—and coercion. It shows that Biden's government has nothing more to offer than the abstract idea that only he can avoid the cataclysm when most Americans feel that it has already arrived right under his government.
Fear is not a good sign when it appears as a campaign promise. The Democrats brandish their drift when they only have to fear the imminence of losing power. There are no proposals or directions. It's the absolute drift. They seek to scare about the end of democracy, but paradoxically, the fear of an election and a candidate appears.
It does not speak well of the party that once proposed hope and today; it gives in to alarmism.
