In a speech that combined political punditry with self-help advice, author and liberal activist Arianna Huffington urged an audience at Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange to find the inner strength to combat the “fear-mongering” she sees coming from the Bush administration.

With midterm elections less than a month away, she said, a worried Republican Party is engaging in a strategy of “fear-mongering” to divert attention from policies she regards as failures, including a ballooning national debt, a failed environmental policy, and the war in Iraq.

“This is a key point in our nation’s history,” Huffington said at the opening program of the temple’s annual “Conversations…” series on Oct. 15. “There are times which are ‘plateau times,’ when we can all get on with our lives and it doesn’t matter much what we do as citizens. This is not such a time.”

The Greek-born Huffington, a writer, socialite, and Picasso biographer who describes herself as a former Republican, indulged in the forthright and biting tone of her Web site — The Huffington Post — which has been a bastion for Bush-bashers since its inception in 2005. Last month, about two-and-a-half-million viewers visited the site, which offers blogs from a diverse group of contributors.

Huffington scoffed at Bush’s approval rating, most recently reported at 40 percent. “I want to meet this 40 percent of America. What exactly are they approving of?” The upcoming Nov. 7 election, she said, “should be a landslide” for the Democratic Party.

She had additional disapprobation for the religious Right, accusing its members of “trying to foment intolerance, using it for the worst possible purposes. There is nothing worse than taking religion and corrupting it.”

The media also deserve a portion of the blame for keeping the population uninformed, she said. The media exhibit symptoms of “attention deficit disorder” as they report details, but miss the larger story and remain content to rely on such sensationalistic but shallow topics as Michael Jackson’s trial or “missing blondes in Aruba.”

To counter such trends, Huffington said, Americans need to develop an “epidemic of fearlessness…. The same way that fear is contagious, so is fearlessness.

“Bad things happen in this country only when good people refuse to act and speak up,” she said. “Dante reserved the worst circle of hell for those who knew better but did not act.”

Americans should stop taking the words of those in positions of leadership — whether political or business — as gospel, she added. “We need to stop looking for a leader on a white horse to save us. We need to look for the leader within us, the leader in the mirror.”

Huffington — whose 11th book, On Becoming Fearless (Little, Brown and Company), was released in September — said that had she not found her own sense of fearlessness, her writing career might have been over before it ever got going. “My second book was rejected by 36 publishers,” she told the audience of about 300. “By number 25, I could have said…, ‘I think I picked the wrong career.’

“All I’m saying is don’t give up.”