October Surprise

There are two theories about American presidential elections, only one of which is right. The first, and most widely publicized, is that presidential campaigns are down-to-the-wire horse races in which any last-minute development can dramatically alter the outcome, no matter how large a lead one candidate may have. This is the theory favored by journalists, pundits, flacks, pollsters, political activists, spooks, gumshoes, all talking heads named Ed or Kevin and the 20 percent of the American population who describe themselves as "undecideds"--sometimes even after they have cast their votes. The horse-race theory is especially popular among people who view themselves as independents or libertarians--that is, curmudgeons, fussbudgets and self-styled mavericks who demand that the candidates woo them on bended knee and literally beg for their support at the polls. (Libertarians, for the uninitiated, are Republicans who like drugs. Independents are Republicans who like drugs but feel guilty about it.)

The second theory, shared by a large number of political scientists and historians, and subliminally shared by an over-whelming majority of the American people, is that presidential elections are determined almost entirely by current economic conditions and, to a lesser extent, by values. This being the case, elections are pretty much decided by the time the parties wrap up their conventions in late summer. Those who subscribe to this view are convinced that most Americans already have a good idea in April who they're going to vote for in November, and only futz around with the levers reading Pat Buchanan and Jerry Brown and Jesse Jackson in the primaries because it doesn't cost anything and it's a harmless way to yank the national chain. There are millions of people in this country who will vote for Clinton because they voted for Carter, Kennedy and maybe even Truman, or who will vote for Bush because they voted for Nixon, Eisenhower and Dewey. These people include Democrats who would rather die than vote Republican, and the millions of Republicans who would rather die than vote Democratic. For these people, it's not a case of voting Republican. It's a case of being Republican. The same is true of Democrats.

To this second, larger group of (continued on page 167)October Surprise(continued from page 84) voters, the prospect of an October surprise--an event so stunning, so unexpected, so earth-shattering that it can turn around a voter's position 180 degrees--is pure nonsense. When these voters break rank with their party, they don't wait until October to do so. The renegade blue-collar Democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 had already made up their minds to vote for the Gipper months in advance of the election and would not have suddenly changed their votes if the Carter Administration negotiated a release of the hostages trapped in Tehran. The blue-collar Democrats were sick of inflation, sick of soaring energy prices and sick of our dilatory response to the Soviet arms buildup. But most of all, they were sick of Jimmy Carter. He was the kind of guy who was easy to get sick of. A lot of us are still sick of him. And he's been gone for 12 years.

The idea of an October surprise, therefore, has no practical relevance to the vast majority of voters. October surprises--a secret deal with Iranian dirtballs to let our hostages go the day before the election, a secret deal with Iranian dirtballs to hold on to the hostages until after the election, LBJ's decision a few days before the 1968 election to talk peace with the Viet Cong--are cynical attempts to win votes from swing voters. Swing voters are people who do not hold strong political principles, or, if they do, don't hold them for more than 20 minutes at a time. The October surprise is aimed at the rootless suburbanite, disgruntled yuppie or professional malingerer who wants to see who's going to win before he even places his bet. The October surprise is aimed at fellow travelers, chameleons and Monday-morning quarterbacks.

However, the idea of an October surprise is more important than the surprise itself. In every presidential election in recent memory, it has been vitally important for the incumbent or front-running candidate to cultivate the notion that he is capable of taking bold, unexpected measures on the eve of the election that would blow his opponent out of the water. Conversely, it is vitally important for his adversaries to cultivate the notion that they are in possession of damaging personal information about the front-runner or incumbent that will blow him right out of the water. And it is vitally important for all candidates to cultivate the notion that something vitally important is going to happen in the vitally important days before the vitally important election. Otherwise, what the hell are we all doing hanging around the TV set watching Ed Bradley trade banalities with Dan Rather?

Most recent elections have not had an October surprise. But most recent elections have been haunted by the specter of a surprise lurking right around the corner. In 1988 there were eleventh-hour rumors about George Bush's involvement in Iran-contra and published reports about his shadowy business dealings. There were also indications that Dan Quayle, to put it kindly, had not set any academic records while at DePauw University.

But these were not October surprises, they were October surpriselettes. The surprise everyone was waiting for was the news that George Bush had a long-running extramarital affair with a woman named Jennifer, who supposedly was a much snappier dresser than Babs and who came dogless. This October surprise never materialized, but its gray specter hovered over the campaign until Election Day itself. This is exactly what October surprises, if they are to work, are supposed to do. Hover. Haunt. Loom. Lurk.

Clearly, October surprises are valuable weapons for politicians waging psychological warfare against their opponents. Yet the main beneficiaries of the October surprise phenomenon are journalists, not politicians. So long as a substantial portion of the public (and we estimate swing voters to be roughly 20 percent of the population) believes that an October surprise is in the offing, it is obliged to keep watching Tom Brokaw and Bernard Shaw, listening to National Public Radio, reading Robert Novak and William Safire and David Broder and William F. Buckley, Jr. If the public should get the idea that the election is in the bag, there would be no reason to keep up on the news. Off goes the TV set, down go the newspaper and magazine sales and poof goes all that revenue from ad sales.

At all costs, the press cannot allow this to happen. Thus, in the late stages of presidential campaigns, political reporters begin to resemble play-by-play guys who keep telling the audience that even though the 49ers are reaming the Colts 45--0, the Colts may still have a few surprises up their sleeves. The media need the October surprise to maintain the illusion that something exciting is going to happen very, very soon. Even if it hardly ever does.

Logically, there is a huge conceptual flaw to the October surprise. If the press, having clawed through the candidates' personal and professional lives with maniacal zeal for 18 months, still hasn't found anything ruinous by September 30, why do we all assume that journalists will be able to dig up something during the frantic final weeks of the campaign? Are they rationing the scandalous material so that everyone will have enough to last until the first Tuesday in November? Conversely, if one candidate is in possession of some politically incendiary revelations about his adversary, why in the world would he wait until the very end of the campaign to disclose them? By that time, it could be too late to change people's minds about whom they plan to vote for. And what politician would run that risk?

The premise of an October surprise is also rooted in the fatuous notion that an administration that has been able to do nothing right for four years can suddenly reverse its disastrous course and correct the ship of state before it sails into the maelstrom. This makes no sense at all. By the time LBJ decided on further negotiations with the North Vietnamese in 1968, the American people had already lived through the Watts riots, the Detroit riots, the Philadelphia riots, the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, tens of thousands of deaths in Southeast Asia and the destruction of the Democratic Party in Chicago. The public was in an ugly mood. A lot of Americans were ready for Richard Nixon's law-and-order message no matter what the Johnson Administration promised to do in Vietnam. We could ask whether it is possible that an earlier October surprise could have saved Hubert Humphrey. It's possible. But it's not likely. If the election had been held two weeks later, he probably still would have lost. The popular vote in 1968 was close. The Electoral College vote wasn't.

The irrelevance of the October surprise is even more true in Jimmy Carter's case. No matter what Carter had done in the final weeks of his 1980 campaign, he was doomed, and he knew it. Carter's presidency officially died in the desert when those helicopters crashed. But the pallbearers had begun gathering right after the prime rate hit 18 percent, right after the killer-rabbit incident, right after the malaise speech. This guy was history long before history officially said he was history. He'd been history since 1978.

Despite all these facts, there will still be lots of talk about an October surprise this year. The pols want it, the flacks want it and the press wants it. Some voters may even want it. The last-minute revelation that George Bush's relatives are involved in some cruddy get-rich-quick scheme, however, will not qualify as an October surprise. In order for a surprise to be a surprise, it has to be surprising, and it is no longer surprising to learn that the President's sons, brothers and best friends are garden-variety sleazeballs. No, if we do have an October surprise involving George Bush, it will almost certainly involve his medicine cabinet. We know for a fact that the President takes, or has taken, Synthroid (for his thyroid condition), Digoxin and Procainamide (for his irregular heartbeat) and Halcion (for his insomnia problem). Five will get you ten that there's Valium, Librium, Tagamet and maybe even a bottle of Prozac hiding somewhere in that cabinet.

As for Bill Clinton, things happen in rural Arkansas, you know? All those Dukes of Hazzard babes in tank tops and cutoffs who don't look anything like Hillary and didn't go to Yale?

There will be other rumors of this ilk. Hillary Clinton's patriotism will be questioned, as transcripts of her speeches to ultra-left-wing symposia over the past 20 years are conjured up through Nexis searches. Dan Quayle's crackpot Bircher dad will resurface for a few gags. So will Marilyn's whacko, Bible-thumping family. Even though it will be clairvoyantly evident weeks and months before the election who is actually going to win, millions of voters backing the wrong horse will cling to the hope of an October surprise. In this sense, these voters will resemble the fans of the Buffalo Bills or the Portland Trailblazers or the Chicago Blackhawks, who kept hoping against hope that "something would happen" when their heroes faced off in the championship round against the Washington Redskins and the Chicago Bulls and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Well, something did happen: The favored teams won.

Surprise, surprise.