In 2008, Candidate Barack Obama criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign for creating an ad that invoked Osama Bin Laden and implicitly questioned his readiness for the position. "We already have a President who plays the politics of fear, and we don't need another," his spokesman said at the time. Well, in 2012 the polls are a little tighter than Obama would like them to be, so Fear is again our friend (did you know that he killed Osama bin Laden with his bare hands?) But Republicans are SHOCKED that other politicians might try to scare up votes. more ›

In its roundup of the top ten media blunders of 2008, Politico's Michael Calderone puts the New Yorker "Politics of Fear" cover at #8 (between the mainstream media's reluctance to acknowledge the National Enquirer's reports of John Edwards' affair and how VP guessing was out of control). Calderone writes, "The Zabar’s set were in on the joke. But some didn’t see the humor in the illustration of Barack and Michelle Obama sharing a terrorist fist-jab and dressed, respectively, as a Muslim and Angela Davis-style black radical, with an Osama bin Laden painting on the mantle and an AK-47 leaning against the fireplace, in which burned the American flag." But he adds that, after the uproar, things ended up okay: "[New Yorker writer] Lizza and editor David Remnick — whose excellent piece on Obama in the same issue was largely overlooked in the ensuing dustup — are working on books dealing with Obama." Plus, Obama won. more ›