The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities. The 2008 race may turn on which party will win the lower- and middle-class whites in industrial and border states-the Democrats’ base from the New Deal to the 1960s, but “Reagan Democrats” in most presidential elections since then. It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as “the other”-as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.