Posted on 10/20/2012 7:53:03 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Every now and then this past Spring and Summer, someone would bring up the specter of an “October Surprise.” There we’d be in the last weeks of the election cycle and bang! out would come some startling revelation about Mitt Romney. Maybe he sacrificed that dog he carried on the roof of his car in some hitherto unknown religious ceremony. Maybe, as was revealed about George Bush early in November 2000, he was caught driving suspiciously slowly after a few too many beers. Who knows?
But as the weeks and months have worn on talk of an October Surprise seems to have subsided.
Until today.
By one of those cosmic conjunctions the sage Carl Jung would doubtless make a lot of, I had not one but two encounters with the idea of an October surprise. The first was while chatting with a politically mature friend this morning. I pointed out that Obama’s campaign seemed to be visibly disintegrating by the day. He acknowledged the remarkable sea change in the fortunes of the campaigns and even allowed that my long-standing prediction that Romney would win (and win big [1]!) might after all turn out to be correct. “But,” he added, “if things look really bad for Obama going into the final week or so, they will think of something to spring.”
Spring what, exactly?
That of course remains to be seen, but it was was just an hour or two later that my friend sent me a link from The Daily Caller [2], based on a Tweet from the Drudge Report, speculating that Gloria Allred “will soon ‘make a move’ to affect the presidential election.” It was Ms. Allred, recall, who dug up news of Herman Cain’s amatory indiscretion, a revelation that pushed him out of the Presidential race last Spring, just as it was Ms. Allred who discovered and publicized the news that Meg Whitman, then running for Governor of California, had an illegal immigrant housekeeper in her past. Bye, bye, Meg!
Who knows what sordid stories Gloria Allred has been attempting to conjure? She remained coy. “I have no comment at this time,” she said. “I don’t discuss meetings with potential clients.” Well, well. How… discreet of her. Maybe she’s been re-reading Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet hoping to find a Romney connection to the grisly Mormons recounted in that early Sherlock Holmes caper.
Who knows what dirt Gloria Allred is running her hands through. I suspect that neither Mitt Romney nor Paul Ryan provides a profitable hunting ground for scandal, but who knows? Maybe Paul Ryan was mean to a high school chum? Maybe Mitt Romney forgot to take out the trash? Whatever Gloria Allred comes up with, I’d wager it won’t be anymore scandalous than Bardwell v Pickwick.
Which is not to say that Team Obama — with or without the collaboration of a surrogate like la Allred — won’t spring an October Surprise of some sort. My friend thought, and I am inclined to agree, that if a surprise is sprung, it will not revolve around any foibles Messrs. Romney or Ryan may exhibit. Nor will it, at this late stage, be likely to have anything to do with the economy. No, the most likely scenario is a foreign adventure of some sort — and something more dramatic than another drone attack. Maybe the administration will suddenly discover some plausible culprits for the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and his three colleagues in Libya. Maybe Obama will decide to bomb or invade Syria. Or maybe Iran will be the recipient of what the administration a year or so back was calling “kinetic activity.” Who knows?
If Romney’s momentum stalls — which I doubt, but if it does — nothing will happen. But if after Monday’s debate there is further disintegration of our Potemkin President and Ohio and Pennsylvania (to say nothing of New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, and Pennsylvania) edge further into the Romney camp, then watch out. The game is up for Obama.
It’s up, that is, short of a deus ex machina in the shape of some manufactured surprise, be it in late October or early November (when many October surprises seem to happen). When I ask myself what an effective surprise might be, I confess I am stumped. I would have said that things had gone too far, that Obama’s record, foreign as well as domestic, was such an unrelieved litany of failure that competent, dynamic, and ostentatiously decent men like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would just sail into the White House.
That, in fact, is what I’ve thought would happen for months. I am all the more confident about it now. I freely confess, however, that my experience of Alinskyite treachery is minimal. I continue to believe that Mitt Romney will win, but I think my friend is right that Team Obama will go to virtually any lengths to seize the election. I am trying to think low. I just hope that I am thinking low enough to account for the Chicago, you-bring-a-knife-to-the-fight-I-bring-a-gun [3] tactics that Obama has bragged about pursuing. He means to win, I have no doubt about that. As of this writing, however, I believe that the United States has not yet descended to full banana-republic. Elections are not that easy to corrupt, at least on the scale necessary to throw a presidential election.
Don’t get me wrong: I’d put nothing past the Obama administration. The question is, what can they put past us? Not enough to win, I think. Let’s see if I’m right.
Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/10/20/what-happened-to-the-october-surprise/
URLs in this post:
[1] win big: http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/no-one-should-be-fooled-by-the-myth-of-obama-8139229.html
[2] a link from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/19/gloria-allred-mum-on-drudge-october-surprise-speculation/
[3] you-bring-a-knife-to-the-fight-I-bring-a-gun: http://nation.foxnews.com/politics/2011/01/10/obama-flashback-if-they-bring-knife-fight-we-bring-gun
Betcha they dug up a bimbo who’ll swear that Romney sexually assaulted her .
The Iran agreement (Iran wants Obama to get re-elected) will be one ‘surprise.’ NY Times and now USA Today are running that story (predicted - shockingly - by WND last week!).
No ‘bimbo eruption’ but I’m sure they can dig up a woman or two that was fired by Romney willing to say anything.
With all the speculative coverage that it has already received there doesn’t need to be an actual surprise, she already has a huge payoff from just the rumor.
I question how strong this surprise could be this late in the game. Voting already going on in many swing states. The Mitt-mentum is so strong they would have already played their trump card.
If they thought their October surprise would shift the momentum they would have let it fly before turning to binders.....
Quite frankly....I could care less what they dig up. I’m voting for Romney (although he WAS NOT my choice by any means).
I want Obama to get the h3ll OUT of the White House. PERIOD!
I’m SICK of the crypto Marxist/Islamist trying to attack our country.
As I said earlier, maybe the 47% video was the OS but had to be used to get Libya out of the news; or the video was released by Team RR.
The old “October Surprise” a few day’s before the election isn’t as effective as it use to be because of early voting. With 40% of the votes have already been cast before the “surprise” drops, even if you manage to swing the vote 5% in your favor you may very well still end up losing come election day.
I suspect the internet has forever killed October surprises.
There is simply too much time for the truth to get out, and too many ways for it to by-pass the “usual channels” between the end of October and election day, even if it falls on the 2nd...
You have to hand it to Gloria.
She was able to do to Herman Cain what more than half of the country refused to do to Obama. If you have a question about something from Obama’s past you are a racist. If you wanted to accuse Herman Cain of something from his past he was automatically guilty... It didn’t matter if he really was or not, he had to go! And as soon as Herman Cain went away, so did the allegations. Probably because they were false.
Whatever she dumps on Mitt Romney, and by default on his supporters, it will hurt him. It won’t matter if it’s true or not. It won’t even matter if it sticks in the long-term as long as it sticks for two and a half weeks. He’s “guilty” because he is trying to beat Obama, and if she says he did something wrong it will end up on “the news”, so people will believe it. When we say Obama has done something wrong, we are the bad guys. When they say Mitt Romney has done something wrong, they are media darlings.
I want to have enough faith in what is left of the American people to believe that whatever she comes up with will not work. As of right now, I’m struggling to do that. I hope I will be proven wrong.
Gloria Allred ??? Why would the dems trot out a social caricature when they are running behind?
That too.
She usually invents story lines with some conservative groping a woman or a Republican abusing the illegal immigrant housekeeper. Maybe she will give us the double whammy and have Romney groping the undocumented help. The only thing more incredulous is Mitt groping Gloria Allred...ewwww.
The October Surprise might well have been the September kidnapping of the American Ambassador to Lybia but a couple of unfortunately present SEALs foiled it by defending the consulate or mission or whatever it was. Had Mr. Brown been kidnapped, the kenyan could have quickly “negotiated” is release with payment made after the election probably of the release of the blind Sheik. Surely the Democrats had something else in the wings in case the Lybia caper didn’t get a sufficient improvement in the polls. Alred would be a natural choice to provide some more October excitement close enough to the election that by the time her fantastic fabrication is shown to be a fantastic fabrication the election will be over.
If someone ever invents a time machine, one of the first trips needs to be back to before she was born, and give her mom a lift over to the nearest Planned Parenthood.
I’m not going to jump off of a building over this, but I am telling people about it. I’m finding that a lot of people still don’t know who she is, so I’m telling them ahead of time, and I’m presenting her to them exactly as I see her; as a crackpot. If nothing comes of it then nothing comes of it. If something does come up, I’ve at least done what I could to let a pretty good amount of people know that a crackpot is planning to do something dirty, and I can only hope that they will end up seeing her that way too.
If she shows up somewhere on Monday early evening with her “bombshell” and at least some of the people I’ve talked to say “There’s that crazy lady he told me about. She really is as nuts as he said she is.”, then I’ve done my small part.
Like I said in another post, if Romney was the psychopath that Bubba is, Alred would simply be threatened with her life and she wouldn’t say a word.
When this bitch is involved it’s almost always a “injured” women involved. The fact that her allegations against Cain proved to be true will lend credibility to the lies her “client” will be providing about Romney. Notice she said she can’t discuss anything involving a client. So the bitch has some hired liar ready to pounce.
One can only hope that it backfires on the Fraud and people are so disgusted that he dragged this bitch out to lie for him, they vote against him. But the American people are, for the most part, gullible and there’s a good chance whatever Alred unleashes could cost voters leaning towards Romney to vote for the Fraud.
Exactly, October surprise # 1 , the kidnap/rescue of American hostages in Libya failed, so now it’s on to surprise # 2. This Alred nonsense was waiting in the wings and they didn’t want to use it, but the Libya plan was a disaster.
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