Fun with October surprises!

It's amazing how Karl Rove can promise a new, double-super-secret October surprise, and a world full of chumps 'ooh' and 'ah' as if everything he's touched since the 2004 elections hasn't gone to crap.

Rove's reputation as a genius is now indelible -- he could design the Maginot line, drive up to it in his Edsal and announce that he was throwing the full weight of the White House behind New Coke, and people would still say he has magic in those chubby hands.

Actually, what Rove's got is a president with a 30-something approval rating and a front row seat from which he can watch all these GOP Reps run away from his boy in a mad, screaming panic. Make no mistake: keeping a few of them in the fold is what that leaked October surprise story -- and the huge ad buys that the RNC is saying it will come through with -- is all about.

But let's play along because October surprise season is always a time for some good, clean, old-fashioned fun.Gary Hart, a guy who's much, much smarter than I, thinks it might be an attack on those Perso-fascists in Tehran:

It should come as no surprise if the Bush Administration undertakes a preemptive war against Iran sometime before the November election.

Were these more normal times, this would be a stunning possibility, quickly dismissed by thoughtful people as dangerous, unprovoked, and out of keeping with our national character. But we do not live in normal times.

And we do not have a government much concerned with our national character.

Well that last is certainly true, but I'll have to disagree with the rest, at least as far as the timing goes. An attack on Iran in the midst of negotiations and just before the election would be so transparent, such a blatant 'wag the dog' scenario that it would become the story, which would mean backfiring on the administration terribly. Also, we learned a lot in the lead-up to Iraq about timing, marketing and product roll-out, all of which leads me to ask: could we really lay out the proper groundwork for an attack by late October? I don't think so.

But Hart may be onto something if you jigger the timetable a bit. While an actual attack might backfire, all the administration has to do by election day is ramp up the fear-mongering, crank the vilification of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Next-Hitler® up to eleven and signal to the base that the Repubs will take care of those dirty heathens right after they slay some weak-kneed Democrats.

Send those subtle coded messages in the aural spectrum that only dogs and Bushbots can hear promising that they might just get their Republican-led rapture and, either way, they won't have to face the ignominious prospect of negotiating alongside a bunch of perfumed French pansies. Tell them if they don't get out and support the Grand Old Party, the Dems might win and we could end up with religious police enforcing Sharia in Greenwich Village!

Then maybe attack in January.

The problem with that idea, though, is that you've got quite a paradox: rattle your saber towards Iran and, yes, you'll energize your base, but you'll also send gas prices high, and that loses everyone else.

Gas prices are key, and that's why I'll stick with what I wrote way back in April -- and what the Associated Press calls a "conspiracy theory": a steady decline in gas prices is your October surprise, and you're already soaking in it.

(Later in the day, after I wrote that post, the administration announced that they were halting deliveries of crude to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It wasn't enough to make a real difference in price -- just 1.8 million barrels had been delivered in the previous month -- but it was symbolic.)

Here, a few facts bear noting. First: gas is retailing at $2.38 a gallon, which is 50 cents less than a month ago, according to Energy Department statistics. That's a 17% drop, leaving it 42.5 cents lower than a year ago, right after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped through all that Gulf Coast energy infrastructure.