The October Surprise (!)
I always like reading Niall Ferguson — the priggish Harvard professor-cum-Newsweek columnist — mostly because I enjoy his contradictory and often incorrect predictions (not to mention his obligatory “I told you so” postscripts).
This week he ponders whether the president is attempting to “wag the dog” the week before the election. Through its liberal propaganda machine (The New York Times), Chicago is hyping the possibility of an Iranian nuclear deal to force an electorally advantageous October surprise:
Recently The New York Times—increasingly the official organ of the Obama administration—offered a tease. “U.S. Officials Say Iran Has Agreed to Nuclear Talks” ran the headline. In the story, the Times quoted unnamed officials as saying that one-on-one talks with Iran had been agreed to in “a last-ditch diplomatic effort to avert a military strike on Iran.” […]
Not only that. If the White House could announce a historic deal with Iran—lifting increasingly painful economic sanctions in return for an Iranian pledge to stop enriching uranium—Mitt Romney would vanish as if by magic from the front pages and TV news shows. The oxygen of publicity—those coveted minutes of airtime that campaigns don’t have to pay for—would be sucked out of his lungs.
The Obama administration is planning a secret deal with the Iranians to finally best Mitt Romney. Or, you know, they could be doing the exact opposite.
[…] With a single phone call to Jerusalem, he can end all talk of his being Jimmy Carter to Mitt Romney’s Reagan: by supporting an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Risky, to be sure. But an even bigger game changer than a peace deal. Because nothing would shut Romney up more completely than a military showdown with Iran. I have a feeling it would work wonders for the president in Florida, too.
Got it. The only thing better than a historic, politically expedient deal to halt Iranian uranium enrichment is… all out war. Will the Obama campaign push an Iranian peace deal before Tuesday in order to make Mitt politically irrelevant? Or will the president endorse an Israeli military strike? Have we covered everything?
Of course, it may now be too late to wag the dog. It may, after all, come down to the dirty old ground game I wrote about in last week’s column—the bare-knuckle fight to win the vital votes in the vital states.
Right, it could come down to plain old political elbow grease in Ohio and Florida. That could indeed decide this thing. There might actually be no surprise at all. But, there also could be one, in the form of comprehensive peace or total war. Peace, war, or nothing — surely one of these three things will happen.
We’ll have to read Ferguson’s column next week to find out.