A recent Newsweek magazine article examined “The Roots of Fear,” providing scientific evidence of why appealing to our fears works. Apparently, we’re hard-wired to panic first and ask questions later.

That comes in handy when you hear a loud noise in a dark alley. But in other circumstances – such as picking a president – reason would be a more useful response.

Yet you can depend on doomsday political advertisements to exploit every last anxiety – from terrorism to the shrinking value of your home.

Prospective voters can thank the holiday season for more benign messages. (Who wants to scare folks while carols hang in the air?) But soon every candidate will want to be seen as the big daddy that will protect us.

Tom Tancredo’s message – characterized by ads warning of gangs crossing the border to rape and sell drugs – didn’t help his now-defunct campaign.

But sometimes, fear doesn’t need any help.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at what I heard at the Columbia, S.C., rally that featured Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama. Reports have touched on it, though not as starkly as the people who told me their deepest fears.

“Some out there, they’re not going to have a black leader,” Kenneth Starks, 56, a mechanic from Columbia, said. “The closer he gets, the more opposition he’ll get.” He compared Obama to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., before uttering the A-word. “The scary part,” he said, “is thinking assassination.”

Starks – one of the nearly 30,000 who came to Williams-Brice Stadium that Sunday afternoon – was not alone in his fear. Chiming in was Mary Stroman, 51, of Irmo, S.C., who held back her support because of her fear. America, she said, is in need of a change. But she thought the country would accept a woman before a black man as its leader. She worried, she said, for the safety of Obama and his family.

Maybe it’s generational.

At the rally, Jose Lopez of Greenville, S.C., was so excited, he could hardly sit still. He was optimistic, he said.
For him, hope overcame fear. Then again, he’s 27.

Leading presidential candidates often are trailed by the Secret Service. But when Obama was assigned protection early in his campaign, no one needed an official statement to confirm the inevitable threats.

Anyone who seeks office takes that risk. With this country’s history, a black candidate has more cause to tread softly. Obama and the other candidates decided it was worth it.

Reporters covering the campaign tend to stop right there. It’s not their job to imagine violent conspiracies. So it’s a startling dose of reality when voters do exactly that.