If they had damaging goods, they would off-loaded it before the first debate.
If Gloria Allred can’t produce the proverbial dead boy or live girl for the press, game over!
I'll remember you said that. 
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
Oh, for crying out loud. She's got NOTHING. She doesn't have a story and she doesn't have a credible liar to get a lie out.
This is just rumor-mongering designed to create anxiety among the opposition.
“I’m slightly amused by all the conservatives that seem ready to jump off of building just on the mention that Gloria Allred might try to drop some dirt on Romney. Like she is an omnipotent demi-god that we must tremble at her very mention.”
Probably because of what she was able to do to Cain.
I personally don’t care if she comes out with proof that Mitt Romney has six illigitimate children, that he hires illegals and that he cheated on his income tax.
I will vote for him over Obama, no matter what story she comes up with. I will vote for the Mormon over the Muslim, no matter what. I want Obama gone now.
There’s still time for Holder to arrest Romney for “tax evasion”, “fraudulent SEC filings” or some other crap like that.
Just let Holder send out an IRS attack squad to arrest Mitt Romney. Or me, for example. Are they that stupid?
Answer, yes, they are that stupid & arrogant and they are indifferent to the political consequences because they think this is Germany 1933 and that they can do as they please.
Watch for it.
Although I cannot recall the precise numbers, I saw a post election analysis for 2004 that showed a considerable portion of Bush’s margin over Kerry in FL was shaved off by that Friday-before-the-election DUI story surfacing. The analysis I read stated that it was evangelical voters who either stayed home or abstained in the Presidential selection that year, and the speculation was that this was precisely the effect the Kerry camp was anticipating when they (or their cut outs) leaked the story to FNC.It just didn’t have the magnitude they expected.
I too have wondered about some image shattering claim that would be launched against Romney. But you have to think that Obama wouldn’t have sat on it this long. If he had been up 10 pts. to date, sure, but it has been essentially a draw, and he knows he is in a box on foreign policy. If he has something, the time to release it is before the debate.
Gloria did not wreck Herman Cain; Herman Cain did with his confused and inept response. That’s why ideology is only part of an equation with a political candidate. political organization is the key to political success. If I ever run for the WH, I am going to form a political operations group that would make Nixon’s Plumbers look like choirboys, in a good way of course.
That's only because the entire GOP is waiting to get in line with the democraps to jump ship and wag their damn fingers. These stupid GOP pundits act like such a bunch of whipped dogs - they make me sick. They were freaking out on Twitter all day today, clutching their pearls and hyperventilating about Gloria Allred. MAN UP PEOPLE...! As if this isn't something they all should have been expecting.
Hope you are right, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she drags out some bitch to spout a bunch of lies that accuse Romney of sexual harassment or allowing it to happen under his watch at a company he managed.
These people are desperate and will do whatever they can to stay in power.
On the other hand, Bush press secretary Dana Perino says that Republicans have additional October Surprise Obama tapes too.
That was 2000 and it cost GWB the popular vote.
Nothing is going to happen.
If they had damaging goods, they would off-loaded it before the first debate.
If Gloria Allred can’t produce the proverbial dead boy or live girl for the press, game over!
The DUI story occured in the 2000 election with Gore, and it did shave off some points for Bush. A lot of folks just can’t countenance alcohaulics even if they’ve been clean and sober for years.
Alred is trying to affect the puckered persimmon white church lady vote as well as they “empowered single white female vote who will react against “dirty old white men”!
If they had damaging goods, they would off-loaded it before the first debate.
If Gloria Allred can’t produce the proverbial dead boy or live girl for the press, game over!
I'll remember you said that.
Here is the October surprise.... within the next week a drone will take out a group of terrorists in Libya or one of it’s neighboring countries. The administration will then claim that they have killed those responsible for the Benghazi embassy attack. (I doubt that these will be the actual terrorists that attacked the embassy, but hey they are terrorists... they deserved to be killed anyway... right?) Any civilian casualties will be played down by the administration and the press.
Allred did NOT find the house keeper....The union thugs got ahold of the housekeeper, took her to an attorney that was part of Brown’s staff, and magically she was given Allred’s number. It was done 6 or 7 weeks out from an election that Whitman could NEVER have won in the first place.
Screw Gloria Allred and all liberals that are so brain dead that they think the rest of the country is as brain dead as California is
It’s a little late for an Oct Obama surprise.
Our ambassador to Libya was killed.
He and the State Dept. do not seem to think about that. He says, “four Americans killed. . .”.
I don’t think they get it.
The ambassador was killed inside the country he was serving, but inside the consulate building.
Many people get this. Some get it but do not understand just what it is.
His plans are done and failed.
I sure hope so, M.A.D. What is your source?
Forget her. Just go out and beat the drum for Romney!
Like all the other 'Surprise Obama Tapes' that seem to come out twice a week?
Folks, there is no smoking gun on either side!
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