The Fear Factor

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On October 31st, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced a cessation of bombing in North Vietnam. The fact that the news came only a week before a close presidential election -- between Democratic hopeful Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon -- led some to conclude that more than military strategy was behind the move. The Vietnam War was deeply unpopular, and an eleventh-hour endgame by the sitting Democratic president would certainly be a plus for Humphrey.

In fact, the Nixon team had not only anticipated such a scenario, campaign staffer and future CIA chief William Casey actually coined a phrase to describe it -- an "October Surprise." (Nixon, of course, had his own, far more Machiavellian October Surprise in the works: secret negotiations that persuaded the South Vietnamese government to pull out of an imminent peace treaty until after the election, in return for more favorable terms from a Nixon administration.)

Since then, the term October Surprise has been applied to a number of scenarios, many appealing to the conspiracy-minded. In 1980, the Reagan campaign contended Jimmy Carter was attempting to engineer a last-minute release of the Iranian hostages to swing the election. Carter staffers later countered that the Reagan team had worked secretly to prevent the release of the hostages until after a Reagan victory. The most recent October Surprises were the late-breaking revelation in 2000 of a decades-old DUI arrest against George W. Bush and the pre-election bombshell in 2004 of a new video by Osama bin Laden.

This fall, with Bush's approval rating hovering near a historic low -- thanks largely to the disastrous war in Iraq but also not helped by a sluggish economy, high gas prices, GOP squabbling over immigration, the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and a general sense that we're all kind of fucked -- Republicans seem to be relying, thus far, on their perennial tactic: spooking Americans on homeland security. Unfortunately for Bush, public skepticism regarding terror alerts has been steadily rising. "It's amazing to me how short a shelf life even the London terror plot had -- it was basically a day," notes New York Times columnist Frank Rich. "I don't think they can play that card anymore. It's the boy who cried wolf."