Rolling Stone: The Fear Factor

What last-minute scare tactic will the Republicans pull to swing the midterm elections? Our panel of experts predicts this fall's October Surprise

MARK BINELLI
Rolling Stone

On October 31st, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced a cessation of bombing in North Vietnam. The fact that the news came only a week before a close presidential election -- between Democratic hopeful Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon -- led some to conclude that more than military strategy was behind the move. The Vietnam War was deeply unpopular, and an eleventh-hour endgame by the sitting Democratic president would certainly be a plus for Humphrey.

In fact, the Nixon team had not only anticipated such a scenario, campaign staffer and future CIA chief William Casey actually coined a phrase to describe it -- an "October Surprise." (Nixon, of course, had his own, far more Machiavellian October Surprise in the works: secret negotiations that persuaded the South Vietnamese government to pull out of an imminent peace treaty until after the election, in return for more favorable terms from a Nixon administration.)

Since then, the term October Surprise has been applied to a number of scenarios, many appealing to the conspiracy-minded. In 1980, the Reagan campaign contended Jimmy Carter was attempting to engineer a last-minute release of the Iranian hostages to swing the election. Carter staffers later countered that the Reagan team had worked secretly to prevent the release of the hostages until after a Reagan victory. The most recent October Surprises were the late-breaking revelation in 2000 of a decades-old DUI arrest against George W. Bush and the pre-election bombshell in 2004 of a new video by Osama bin Laden.

(The rest is here.)