The real October Surprise
Karl Rove is no idiot. When he promises an ‘October Surprise‘, he delivers. So, if he promised an ‘October Surprise‘ back in September, he knew what he was delivering. I have pondered this topic in a few other posts(here, here, and here), but never found his special gift to the world.
But what is it???
I think his ‘October Surprise’ is a gift that keeps on giving, for at least the next 18 months or so.
The Republicans took a dive in the midterms.
Before we look at the possibility of the Republicans taking a dive, I want to state that I wholeheartedly believe that voters overwhelmingly wanted Republicans out of office and a change of direction for the nation. But, perhaps Karl Rove did not use all the tricks (ex. electronic voting manipulation, caging lists, etc.) which are accessible to him, allowing the Democrats to take control.
Basically, the Republicans could benefit greatly from taking a dive, letting the shit hit the fan with Democrats in power, then in 2008 come in to clean up the mess. I know, the mess is the Republican’s mess, but remember, these guys operate at a 5th grade mentality.
If you don’t believe me about their mentality, check out this passage from an article in Rolling Stone that I mentioned previously:
According to the rules, conferences have to include at least one public, open meeting…amazingly, the Republicans sneak off to hold the real conference, forcing the Democrats to turn amateur detective and go searching the Capitol grounds for the meeting. “More often than not, we’re trying to figure out where the conference is,” says one House aide.
In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a secret conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where Republicans closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door, but no one answered. A House aide compares the scene to the famous “Land Shark” skit from Saturday Night Live, with everyone hiding behind the door afraid to make a sound. “Rangel was the land shark, I guess,” the aide jokes. But the real punch line came when Thomas finally opened the door. “This meeting,” he informed Rangel, “is only open to the coalition of the willing.”
So, now that I’ve illustrated the maturity of the Republicans, let’s regress to childhood for a moment and role play…
You are a child in a room. There is one other person in the room. There is a table. On the table is a jar filled with your favorite candy. It isn’t your candy, but you love the candy. You eat a piece, yummmmmmm. You eat another and another. Pretty soon the jar is empty. You hear someone coming.
You have two options. One is to stick around and take responsibility for eating all of the candy. The other option is to go out the back door and avoid any confrontation as to who ate the candy. You know that if you leave, the other person will be held responsible for your actions.
So, what would you do as a child? Not just any child, but the type of child who holds ‘public’ meetings in secret?
Not the best analogy, but hopefully it makes the point. I think that Karl Rove had the Republicans take a dive so that in 2008 they could come back to ‘fix’ the results of the growing mess that the Republicans made in the past 6 years.
The list of the current mess is long and I am tired, but how about Iraq, corruption, a housing bubble about to burst, the growing deficit, and on and on…
The electorate has an amazingly short memory and I predict that the next 2 years will be a period of Republicans turning these into Democrat failures.
