A week of fear: but not in the GOP's convention hall.

'ARE Americans going to react to a message of fear, or respond to a message of hope?" asked Tom Vilsack, the Democratic governor of Iowa. Vilsack was speaking at his party's "rapid response" center at the Republican convention in New York, where he, along with other Democratic officials, spinmeisters, and sympathetic pundits, spent much of convention week repeating one simple point: Democrats represent "the politics of hope," as senior Kerry adviser Tad Devine put it, while Republicans represent the "politics of fear."

But if one ventured outside the confines of Madison Square Garden and its media center, a far different story emerged. Supporters of John Kerry staged dozens of events--protests, plays, book readings, concerts, and parties--designed to counter the message of the convention. And those events were, by and large, almost desperate expressions of fear, in which participants pronounced themselves terrified of George W. Bush and what might happen to the United States if he were elected to a second term.

"I'm scared," the actress Rosie Perez told a crowd gathered at Crobar, a stylish Chelsea nightclub, on the night before she joined 200,000 anti-Bush demonstrators in the pre-convention protest march. "I'm f***ing scared out of my pants right now, and if you're not, wake up." A few minutes later, the comedian Chevy Chase took the stage to say of George W. Bush, "He's frightening. He's scaring the crap out of me." Chase said the president "makes Barry Goldwater look like Pollyanna," but then realized that some in the mostly young crowd didn't get the comparison. "I remember 1964. You hadn't been born yet," the 60-year-old Chase told the audience, with a slight tinge of bitterness in his voice.

Chase and Perez did not say exactly why they were so frightened. Of course it had to do with Bush, but what, precisely, was it that was so terrifying? A few days later, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman offered an answer.

At a New York University forum entitled, "The Books on Bush," Krugman said the president is the front man for a decades-old, far-reaching, right-wing conspiracy to gain control of the U.S. government. "We probably make a mistake when we place too much emphasis on Bush the individual," Krugman said. "This really isn't about Bush. Bush is the guy that the movement found to take them over the top."

Krugman explained that the conspirators who placed the president in power were the same ones who tried to remove Bill Clinton from office. But the conspiracy itself began far earlier. "There's complete continuity going back, really, I think--but this is my next book--you really need to go back to Goldwater," Krugman said. "A lot of this has to do with civil rights, and the people who don't like them." (Krugman's audience, older than the crowd at Crobar, seemed to know who Goldwater was.)

As Krugman reached the end of his talk, he came to the question of what might be done to avert a rightwing takeover. Of course it's important to defeat George W. Bush, Krugman said, but that's not enough. "The answer, I think, my great hope now, is that we need an enormous unearthing of the scandals that we know have taken place," Krugman explained. "We need a mega-Watergate that rocks them back." The audience, which had given Krugman a standing ovation before he even began speaking, loved it.

Still, there were undoubtedly some Democrats who enjoyed Krugman's analysis but found it a bit, er, understated. For them, the hot ticket of convention week--the true anti-Bush hard stuff--was the double-billing of playwright Tony Kushner's Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy and New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller's Patriot Act: A Public Meditation, at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village.

Kushner's play is a "work in progress" in which First Lady Laura Bush, played by Academy Award-winning actress Holly Hunter, reads to a group of Iraqi children. Early on, Mrs. Bush discovers that the children are in fact ghosts, since all had been killed by American bombs (the situation is explained to the First Lady by an angel, played by Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon). As the play goes on, Mrs. Bush fights the realization that her husband is a terrible, remorseless man responsible for thousands of needless deaths, not only from the war in Iraq, but from capital punishment in Texas. "My husband, he executed everyone they told him to, everyone they let him, I should say," Kushner's Mrs. Bush tells the audience. "My God, a hundred-and-something people and he never even missed his early, early bedtime, nor for that matter, from what I could see as I sat up reading and rereading Dostoyevsky, ever even stirred in his sleep!"

In Patriot Act, Miller presented a far less melodramatic, and, if possible, even more menacing, Bush. Analyzing the president's misstatements, gestures, and policies, Miller told the audience that the president has a plan for "the transformation of the United States into a theocracy" and the "replacement of the Constitution by the first five books of the Old Testament." In Bush's new America, Miller explained, the justice system would be based on Leviticus, with Americans being sentenced to death for adultery, homosexuality, and premarital sex, among many other capital offenses. "It's hard to understate the extent to which this administration is driven by the theocratic agenda," Miller said.

Miller spoke in all apparent seriousness, and his audience appeared to listen in the same spirit. At one point, on the screen behind him, Miller projected a lineup of photographs of the leaders of the theocratic coup. In the upper left, there was the late theologian R. J. Rushdoony, who believed in the rule of Biblical law; next was conservative California philanthropist Howard Ahmanson; next was Marvin Olasky, of "compassionate conservatism" fame; and then came Sen. Trent Lott, televangelists Jerry Falwell and James Robison, the Traditional Values Coalition's Rev. Louis Sheldon, and, finally, radio host Oliver North. In Miller's narrative, they were all intimately connected, and the audience was supposed to understand that all those connections led to George W. Bush, the White House, and the imposition of theocracy. And indeed, most of the overwhelmingly friendly audience seemed to get it; they gave Miller a rousing ovation when he finished (his last bit had been a warning that Bush intended to postpone, steal, or possibly even cancel this year's election).

By the end of convention week, the anti-Bush, pro-Kerry performers had sent a clear message: Be very, very afraid. Yet Democrats continued to maintain that they were on the sunny side of the hope/fear issue. Paul Krugman himself said so, when he wrote--just days after warning darkly of a right-wing takeover of the United States--that Barack Obama, the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention, had delivered "a message of uplift and hope," while George W. Bush "intends to run a campaign based on fear."

Perhaps some Democrats truly believed that. But in New York, Krugman, Miller, Kushner, Hunter, Nixon, Chase, Perez, and their fellow anti-Bush celebrities spent more time appealing to fear than anyone speaking from the podium of the Republican convention.