Mike Ruddy teaches political science at SUNY Oswego.

Now that October has arrived, it might be safe to speculate what this most partisan of administrations might do to insure that its heirs in the McCain camp inherit the mantel of near-imperial presidential power. What will be the October Surprise that potentially turns the tide for the candidacy of Senator McCain? The sizeable bounce in the polls that McCain received from the selection of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate suggests strongly that the electorate is highly vulnerable to any political slight of hand.

Before I continue, let me begin by explaining exactly what an October Surprise is. Even the most casual political reader has probably heard the expression, but many may not know the origin of the term. (Don’t turn to Wikipedia; since almost anyone can edit the definitions, subsequently they have been tainted by partisan interpretations of history.) An October Surprise is any event which occurs in the final weeks of a campaign that can significantly influence the outcome of an election. That event can be a policy disclosure, a revelation such as a scandal, or an occurrence of national import. It can be deliberate, contrived, mere happenstance, or a response to a significant event. The surprise is always the result of actions taken by either one of the candidates or someone who supports one of the candidates. The essential element is that it happen close enough to an election that the true or complete character of the event is yet unknown but its impact upon the electoral process is considerable.

The term first appeared in the mainstream media during the 1980 presidential election. In the weeks just prior to election day, former CIA Director William Casey, a surrogate for presidential candidate Governor Ronald Reagan, entered into secret negotiations with the Iranian government. The Iranians were still holding hostage American diplomats and the embassy-based soldiers who protected them. President Carter’s failure to secure the American hostages’ release was one of the primary reasons for his unpopularity. Subsequently, the Reagan campaign feared that an October Surprise release of the hostages might turn the tide for the incumbent Democrat. Though President Carter had diplomats negotiating with the Iranians, private citizen Casey opened a second, wholly unauthorized and entirely illegal channel of negotiations offering more favorable conditions to the Iranians than the official U.S. position. Casey’s secret diplomacy was successful, Jimmy Carter was easily defeated, and the hostages were not released until just as Ronald Reagan took the oath of office The release was literally timed to coincide with Reagan’s presidential oath. Critically, all of the largess promised by private citizen Casey was delivered to Iran either directly or indirectly during the first term of the Reagan administration. It is somewhat ironic that the term now applies to Casey’s secret negotiations, rather than the events that Casey sought to prevent.

The emergence of the term in 1980 to describe the action should not imply that similar actions had not happened in earlier campaigns. The term probably existed in political jargon for at least a decade prior to its emergence into common political parlance. However, the degree in which partisan advantage so blatantly trumped national interest, not to mention the prolonged imprisonment of American soldiers and diplomats, was unprecedented. A case in point is when President Lyndon Johnson made a peace overture to North Vietnam in 1968. The outcries from Republicans and dissident Democrats that these actions were solely to secure his reelection was one of the primary reasons LBJ decided not to run for a second full term as president.

What will be this election year’s October Surprise? One possibility is that it was initiated just last month. On August 29, Vladimir Putin, prime minister and de facto chief executive of the Russian Federation, accused the Bush administration of encouraging Georgia’s attack on the renegade province of South Ossetia to influence the outcome of the American presidential elections. Informed political observers have every reason to doubt the credibility of any pronouncement made by this former KGB official. However, in light of McCain’s past poll performance during periods of international crisis, and the Bush administration’s rabid partisanship, Putin’s assessment seems plausible, if not probable. When late last year Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan, Senator McCain’s poll numbers rose dramatically.

It is not too difficult to imagine, that Bush, still believing that he can see into Putin’s soul, thought that the Russian leader, posited just seats away from Bush in the Olympic stadium in Beijing, would not respond decisively to a Georgian attack on the pro-Russian breakaway province. Bush might have hoped that Russia’s response would be as slow and deliberate as his father’s reaction to the Iraqi attack on Kuwait in 1990–delayed enough to impact upon America’s November elections. But that is not what happened. Russia’s response was swift and definitive. Though in speech after speech Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has continued to try to resurrect the Cold War, America’s NATO partners appear to be having no part of it. Russia may not provide the October Surprise.

However, don’t count out this potential scenario. On September 22 it was reported in the on-line edition of the San Francisco Chronicle that a fleet of Russian ships are sailing to the Carribean to bolster Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Putin is as much a Cold Warrior as either Bush or Secretary Rice. Also, North Korea seems to be upset that the Bush administration has not kept its word about removing them from the terrorist nation list. Provoking North Korea could be part of the electoral strategy. There’s still hope to bring back the Cold War in time for the November presidential elections.

Enter Wall Street! Yes, as Spanish scholar George Santayana wrote more than 100 years ago, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So for all those laissez-faire capitalists who either ignored the lessons learned on Black Tuesday seventy-nine years ago or the conservative revisionists who thought that FDR overreached, America had to approach the brink of economic disaster to re-learn those fateful lessons. This is an unintended October Surprise. What is astounding is the swiftness to which these supposed neo-conservative ideologues abandoned their classic conservative dogma and partially embraced the solutions crafted by FDR and his predecessor in Albany, Governor Al Smith. However, unlike FDR, Bush will not help Main Street in equal measures to Wall Street, unless forced to do so by the Democrats. With the cowardice evidenced so far by the Congressional Democrats, I am not hopeful they will stand up to the battered but still-functioning Bush media machine and craft a measure that deals justly with both ends of the economic crisis. But who could imagine that the October Surprise might be that W begins to act like FDR?

Until the near economic collapse of this week, most pundits assumed the October Surprise would be an attack on Iran. That still might be part of it. There has been too much propaganda generated about Iran’s alleged contribution to the instability of Iraq and even Afghanistan for it not to happen. One might argue that it has been discussed so thoroughly it could hardly still qualify as a “surprise.” In fact, it is has been speculated so frequently that its impact on the electorate might be minimal. The nearly two-thirds of the American electorate who think that the attack on Iraq was a catastrophic mistake will not be as quick to believe the reasons for an equally foolhardy attack on Iran.

What might ultimately scuttle the plans to attack Iran is the Wall Street meltdown. Adding an oil crisis where gas retails from $5-$7 per gallon could be a deathblow to this nation’s teetering economy. Even the ostrich-like disciples of Herbert Hoover who generate the Bush administration’s economic policy must know that. Hopefully, they can prevail on Cheney’s cadre of hawks to avert this scenario.

So if surgical air strikes on Iran are off the table and the economic crisis seems to have a mind of its own, what will be the event that ultimately determines the outcome of the election? Events are moving so quickly it’s impossible to tell. However, one of the products of the 24/7 news cycle is that political speculation has gained increased stature in the never-ending challenge to fill all that broadcast time. Without a doubt, in the 2008 presidential election there will be an October Surprise. The only question is what will it be, or more accurately, what combination of deliberate actions, provoked events, or unanticipated but heavily spun occurrences will comprise this year’s October surprise package.

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