What would a presidential election be without pondering the potential for an October surprise? Under the standard scenario, an incumbent president uses the power of his office to engineer a foreign-policy success that burnishes his image going into the final weeks before an election. The possibility of such Machiavellian manipulation was barely discussed in September, when President Obama seemed to be lengthening his lead in the polls. Now that the gap in the race to the White House appears to be closing, October-surprise speculation is on the rise.
Here are four scenarios the administration might mull over to generate some favorable, late-breaking news.
1. Strike Libyan Terrorists. Hitting targets in pursuit of those who organized and executed the 9/11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi is quite possible. Indeed, shortly after the foreign media reported that the U.S. intelligence community is compiling a Libyan hit list. Recently, administration officials confirmed that strikes are under active consideration.
Technically, taking out terrorists in Libya isn’t an October surprise. U.S. presidents are expected to go after terrorists that go after Americans. The public wants the perpetrators brought to justice, one way or the other.
The problem for the president is that such a strike is unlikely to quell the questions being raised over how the administration handled security for U.S. personnel in Libya and how it responded to the attack that killed four Americans. Recently, a heated hearing on Capitol Hill produced more unfavorable sound bites, including testimony by one former official that the security in Benghazi was kept “artificially low.”
Rather than hype how things are going in Libya, the White House would probably be happier at this point if the issue faded away. Also, there is no telling how an independent U.S. operation might affect conditions inside the country or how progressives might react if they feel the president is broadening the war on terror rather than ending it as he promised.
A U.S. operation in Libya might be an appropriate act of justice or an effective counterterrorism act to stem Al Qaeda’s influence, but it is not likely to give the president’s numbers a bump.
2. Make a Deal with the Devil. Might Washington make a last-minute deal with Tehran that gets the regime to suspend its nuclear-enrichment program? Progress toward removing the threat of a nuclear Iran would certainly be a signature foreign-policy success.
Iran has denied it is getting ready to make a deal. So has the White House. But speculation persists, with some Iranian officials sending mixed messages.
Even if a deal were cut, Mr. Obama’s challenger could simply argue that Tehran is playing rope-a-dope—pressing the White House to ease sanctions now and resuming its nuclear-weapons program just a bit down the line.
Hard to see how, even if a deal materializes, it would move any pollster’s bubble.
3. Get the Number-One Terrorist. During Bush’s reelection campaign, the biggest October-surprise rumor was that the wily president was just waiting for October to get Bin Laden. In retrospect, we know how silly that was. Terrorists are elusive targets. You pretty much have to get them when you find them. This is becoming more true everyday, as transnational terrorist groups focus more on adopting “operational security” measures and implementing counterintelligence programs to keep from being found.
Certainly President Obama would love to get his hands on Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current CEO of Al Qaeda. But, if the calendar does work out right for when he goes down, odds are it will be more of a coincidence than a manufactured surprise.
4. Smooth Sailing in the South China Sea. All the fireworks in the Middle East have distracted American attention from rising tensions in the Pacific—where every day, it seems, two or more countries make threats over obscure and barren islands. Just the other day, Forbes reported sales of Japanese cars in China have plummeted due to ill will over who owns the miniscule Diaoyu Islands.
The president could sweep in like a latter-day Teddy Roosevelt and calm the Asian waters, chalking up another Nobel. That is pretty far-fetched. If the White House had really wanted to “pivot to Asia” and solve some disputes, it would have started doing so months ago.
Further, solving a problem that no one is paying attention to doesn’t help you all that much at the polls.
Of course, there’s no end to the number of October scenarios that can be dreamed up—each more far-fetched than the last. But just about any October surprise is a stretch when it comes to intentionally impacting the outcome of an election. Engineering a real surprise that would produce clear, predictable results is a lot easier in the conspiracy world than the real one.
Comments
Pretty ridiculous, implausible article. First of all, Barack Obama never promised to end the war on terror. In his 2008 run for the presidency, he promised to end our combat role in Iraq, which he stipulated would mean that all combat troops would be out of Iraq by 2010, and all American forces would be out by the end of 2011, which means the President was honoring the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated in the last months of the Bush administration. Additionally, once he assumed the presidency, he sent over 60,000 additional troops to Afghanistan with the promise made at West Point at the end of 2009 that a transition to Afghan security forces was in the near future and a little later in his presidency made the commitment that all U.S. combat forces would be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014 with a security commitment to the Afghans until 2024. The reason we train Afghans is so that they can take the lead. Otherwise, what would be the point in training them? The neo-conservatives do not seem to get this as they promote our indefinite combat involvement in Afghanistan. But back to my original argument, Barack Obama never promised to end the war on terror. Promising to end the war in Iraq is a lot different from promising to end the war on terror. The President knows that this is a war against al Qaeda and that it is a generational challenge. That's why instead of invading countries that had nothing to do with 9-11, he has refocused our strategy on going after the group that actually hit us on 9-11 and its affiliates. The same people who criticize the president on Libya and say he covered up and all that malarkey are the same people who hyped the threat from Iraq and invaded a country that had absolutely no ties to al Qaeda and absolutely nothing to do with 9-11 and that culminated in 4500 American deaths, tens of thousands wounded on the battlefield, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, millions of Iraqi refugees, the complete decimation of an already decrepit Iraqi infrastructure, 3 trillion dollars of debt, and de facto Iranian domination in Iraq. The invasion of Iraq that these morons promoted destabilized the entire region for generations to come and al Qaeda was never in Iraq before we invaded it.