What October Surprise?

Among Bush administration opponents – and not just those on the Internet either – there's a deep-seated, Florida-inspired, and not unreasonable fear of an October or even November 2nd "surprise." Over the last year, for instance, there have been spasms of Diebold-mania (in honor of one of the Republican-donor firms making the paper-trail-less, touch-screen-computer voting machines, considered quite capable of producing a Florida II). Or what about those "felon lists," endlessly purged in Baby Bush's state of perfectly un-felonesque African-American Floridians but not of (usually Republican-voting) Hispanics, felonious or otherwise? Michael Moore is heading for the state on Election Day, camera in hand, but who isn't?

Then there have been those conspiracy-theory rumors that Osama bin Laden is already an administration captive held in a spiderhole somewhere in Pakistan until needed at the end of October? Or is al-Qaeda perhaps preparing a massive, last moment terrorist attack in the United States meant to throw the election to the "other fanatic," the one most likely in his second term to continue to produce a terrorist dreamworld? Or will a last second Red Alert turn the attention of voters to the Presidential column, or will that alert even be the excuse for the Bush administration to postpone the elections?

These and other rumors, theories, fears, and end-of-the-Republic-as-we-know-it scenarios have not just been flying around the Web, but making their way into the mainstream media. For instance, Robert Kuttner of the Boston Globe and the American Prospect magazine just wrote up three election scenarios to fear, each chilling in its own way; while in a recent column (Fear of Fraud), Paul Krugman of the New York Times, regularly on the mark, took out after the dangers of touch-screen voting as well as Jeb Bush's vote-vetting scams. According to the Times' David M. Halbfinger, John Kerry is taking the possibility of November 2nd surprises seriously indeed and is already ramping up his legal teams to duke it out in battleground states where results seem in any way suspicious. ("Aides to Kerry say the campaign is taking the unprecedented step of setting up a nationwide legal network under its own umbrella, rather than relying, as in the past, on lawyers associated with state Democratic parties... 'A million African-Americans disenfranchised in the last election,' he said at the NAACP convention in Philadelphia..., 'Well, we're not just going to sit there and wait for it to happen. On Election Day in your cities, my campaign will provide teams of election observers and lawyers to monitor elections, and we will enforce the law.'")

And while the administration undoubtedly isn't holding Osama bin Laden for just the right moment, there are more modest recent examples of its willingness to go that extra mile down some dark alley in its own electoral self-interest. Consider, as a start, an interesting graphic recently posted by Juliusblog (and spotted by an eagle-eyed Tomdispatch reader). It combines the clever, ever-sliding Bush approval chart at Professor Pollkatz's Pool of Polls with the major administration alerts into a pattern that looks suspiciously self-serving indeed.

Or take the most recent Orange Alert, which came just after the Democratic Convention as Kerry was setting out on the campaign trail and was based on a series of arrests of al-Qaeda figures in Pakistan, the first of which, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the FBI's twenty-second "Most Wanted" terrorist, was announced on the day of Kerry's acceptance speech. To be more precise, it was announced by Faisal Saleh Hayyat, Pakistan's interior minister, at that top Pakistani hour for making crucial announcements – midnight (but acceptance speech day halfway across the world.). Actually, to be yet more accurate, the arrest itself had been made not that day but four days earlier. What's surprising here is not the four-day lag, but the speed with which the announcement was made – a kind of unseemly tip-off to any al-Qaeda figures connected to Ghailani. As former CIA operative Robert Baer commented on the timing of the announcement: "It makes no sense to make the announcement then. Presumably, everything [Al Qaeda] does is compartmented. By announcing to everybody in the world that we have this guy, and he is talking, you have to assume that you shoot tactics. To keep these guys off-balance, a lot of this stuff should be kept in secret. You get no benefit from announcing an arrest like this."