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>> Your turn: What do you predict for the October surprise? See reader responses in our National Affairs blog.
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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."
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Indeed, the latest survey by pollster Peter Hart confirms that such scare tactics are losing their effectiveness. "The recent stress on national security has helped the Republicans, but it's been a marginal effect," Hart says. "I don't think that issue cuts the same way anymore." Indeed, recent polls contain some daunting numbers for Republicans hoping to reach into their old bag of tricks: Seventy-three percent of Americans believe the country is unprepared for a biological or chemical attack, and sixty-one percent consider Bush's comparison of Islamic terrorists and the Nazis to be both inappropriate and self-serving.
"We know the Republicans will come up with something," says House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. "In October, unencumbered by money, fact or decency, they will pull anything to win. They think they can undermine us on national security. What's sad about what John Boehner said about Democrats being 'more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people' was not only that it was over-the-top, but that he didn't even think it was. You should know when you're lobbing a hand grenade and not just passing a bonbon. But this is the nature of the comments you will see. We're dealing with desperate people, so they have to revert as usual to their politics of fear. It should come as no surprise to anyone. I just hope the American people don't fall for their gimmick."
With the political reality so clearly running against Bush, pundits wonder: How will the Democrats manage to lose this time? The party's own incompetence is generally guarantor enough, but Karl Rove and Co. surely have something special in the works, a political bombshell designed to change the momentum of the midterm elections. We surveyed a broad range of political thinkers and asked for predictions, both serious and fanciful, of possible October Surprises by the GOP. Here are the results.
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Fence Off Mexico!
PAT BUCHANAN, conservative pundit and former presidential candidate
If I were recommending an October Surprise, I would tell Karl Rove to have the president ask for $5 billion to build a fence along the Mexican border. It would rally the Reagan Democrats to Bush and put the Democrats in a real bind with their Hispanic base.
Bin Laden Seized!
DONNA BRAZILE, former campaign manager for Al Gore
They'll raise the terror-alert levels. The FBI will come out and
announce that some domestic plot has been uncovered. Or someone big
will be captured in Pakistan, someone on our most-wanted list, a
senior operative in Al Qaeda. And then there's always the big one
-- bin Laden captured or killed.
George Clooney Arrested!
ELI PARISER, executive director of MoveOn.org
Looking at the news this fall, I have to imagine the Republicans
are hoping for some little girl to go missing. Because the JonBen?t
Ramsey coverage has been remarkably effective at drowning out the
reality of people coming home in body bags from Iraq every day. If
I were Karl Rove, I would assign the Department of Justice and the
FBI to drum up more celebrity show trials. That's really their best
hope: another Michael Jackson scandal.
Terrorist Bomb Plot Foiled!
CLARK KENT ERVIN, former inspector general for homeland
security under Bush
The most dramatic October Surprise, obviously, would be to catch
bin Laden. That would be huge. But there's no reason to believe it
will happen anywhere in the near future. My sense is that they are
less concerned these days with catching bin Laden: The unit
dedicated to hunting him has been closed. And the raising of
terrorist-threat levels won't work like it did in 2004, when they
seemed to be timed with major events in the election cycle. More
likely, the president will continue to do what he's done -- that
is, to make the case that the recent foiled plots in London and
Miami and Atlanta suggest that he must be doing something right,
because there hasn't been a terror attack since 9/11.
President Bush Assassinated!
LARRY BEINHART, author of "American Hero," the basis of the
film "Wag the Dog"
Here's what Rove is going to do: He's going to have Bush
assassinated. They blow up Air Force One. Maybe shoot it down with
a missile that will turn out to have been stolen from a U.S. Air
Force base. They'll track it back to Afghanistan, say it got into
Al Qaeda's hands that way. It solves everything. It rallies
Americans around this terrorist assassination and gets rid of this
loser who's embarrassing them. Dick Cheney steps grimly to the
helm, declares martial law and becomes President for Life.
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Cheney Shoots Daughter!
BILL MAHER, comedian
(1) Bin Laden will be captured and we will discover a detailed plan of the next Al Qaeda strike as well as an entire album of color photos of Tom and Katie's baby.
(2) A terrorist plot to blow up the World Series will be foiled through a warrantless wiretap on the bullpen phone.
(3) John Mark Karr says Ted Kennedy put him up to it.
(4) Arrange for Iran to retake the hostages.
(5) Change the name of October to "9/11."
(6) To rally the religious right, Dick Cheney shoots his lesbian daughter in the face, accidentally.
(7) Announce that Saddam has escaped. And that he supports Ned Lamont.
(8) Finally admit global warming is caused by humans -- specifically, by the Dixie Chicks.
(9) Update the phrase "cut and run Democrats" to "fuck and run Democrats."
(10) Who needs an October Surprise when you've got Diebold?
Rumsfeld Fired!
JOHN BATISTE, retired major general who led Army's First
Infantry Division in Iraq
Replacing Donald Rumsfeld would instill confidence in the American
people. Putting aside politics completely, the guy has so much
baggage with respect to failed policy, bad decision-making and
taking us to war with the wrong plan that we really have no
alternative but to hold him accountable for the fiasco in Iraq. We
need a new strategy: We have to get serious about training and
equipping Iraqi security forces and consider other alternatives for
governing Iraq. But none of this will happen until we get rid of
Rumsfeld -- his arrogance will probably stand in the way of him
doing the right thing and stepping down on his own.
Condi Becomes Vice President!
FRANK RICH, "New York Times" columnist
One thing that everyone agrees on is that Rumsfeld has got to go.
He's a dead man walking. Bush is loyal, but I think when it's up to
protecting himself, ruthlessness can prevail. It could be a win-win
situation, depending on who they get to replace him. My guess would
be someone above reproach -- maybe a Democrat. I've also heard the
scenario where Cheney would go and they'd make Condi Rice vice
president. She's the only person in the administration with any
popularity.
Another October Surprise would be coming up with some band-aid for Iraq, some bogus troop withdrawal -- like cutting back drastically to 50,000 troops. No matter how they slice it, Iraq is the real problem. What else does Bush have to play with? There's nothing dramatic that can happen with the economy. He can't magically rebuild New Orleans.
The President Comes Clean!
AL FRANKEN, comedian
They should have gotten rid of Rumsfeld two years ago -- but if
they do that now, it's admitting a mistake. And they don't like
admitting mistakes. Of course, there is always that for an
October Surprise: the six-hour address to the nation, where Bush
says, "I really want to start over with everyone's trust, and the
only way to do that is to admit every mistake I've made."
It'd be like, "First of all, I'm not going to use the word 'lie,' but we misled you on the WMD thing. And torturing people -- bad idea. Because what happens, apparently, is word gets out, and it causes resentment. Also, calling the War on Terror a crusade: That was unfortunate. In my defense, when I said it, I was not aware there had been crusades before. I was not a good student in college. I'm told now that there were actually a number of crusades. That evidently sticks in the craw of the Arab people. Had I known that, I would not have said it."
He could really take a week and spend a night on each topic. You know, the Coalition Provisional Authority and all of their mistakes, that could be a two-nighter. And by the end of the week, everyone would be going, "What a guy! We've never seen that kind of bravura performance. His command of the details of how he fucked up everything just blew us away."
The War Ends!
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, founder of the Huffington Post
Taking a page from Nixon in '68, the Bush administration will
announce it has a secret plan to end the war in Iraq. They just
won't let it slip that it involves selling the entire country to
Halliburton.
>> Your turn: What do you predict for the October surprise? See reader responses in our National Affairs blog.