Over on the right side of the fence, we’re hearing plenty of voices arguing that al-Qaida wants to see George Bush defeated. From where I sit, it seems equally or more likely that bin Laden and company would love to see Bush re-elected (he’s been their best recruiting agent, in Iraq and elsewhere).
But really, to speculate on this subject either way is to go down a rathole. Who cares which candidate al-Qaida might favor? Osama doesn’t vote. All that matters is, which candidate will best protect the American people, bolster the American economy, and help build a safer and more peaceful world for our kids?
But the prospect of an October surprise now looms scarily over the electoral landscape. And the most important thing we can do is to inoculate ourselves in advance against it.
The nightmare scenario goes something like this: Sometime in October, al-Qaida strikes inside the U.S. Either (a) Americans rally behind the president, even though the occasion of a second attack might cause us to feel the administration had failed us; or (b) though there might well have been little any president could do to stop the attack, many Americans blame Bush — and that evokes a patriotic chorus of rally-round-the-prez from our leaders and our media, with sanctimonious cries of “Remember Madrid!”
It barely matters, then, whether the reaction goes for or against Bush. Either way — if we accept, as U.S. intelligence reports, that “influencing the elections” is an al-Qaida goal — the result will be an al-Qaida success. Unless we’re somehow able, ahead of the fact, to draw some lines in the rhetorical sand.
The “influencing elections” debate began in earnest in March, when the Madrid attacks and subsequent fall of Bush ally Jose Maria Aznar’s government led American conservatives to complain that Spain’s voters had capitulated to al-Qaida in a shameful act of cowardice. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of Spanish voters had long opposed their government’s policy of supporting the Iraq war; never mind that the last-minute swing against the incumbent government was sparked by disgust at the spin games it played in the immediate aftermath of the attack (when it tried to pin the blame on Basque terrorists). Details, details!
There was and is a blunt agenda at work in this gross distortion of the record: the party of Cheney and Rove is laying the groundwork to argue that, in the wake of an al-Qaida attack, it is our patriotic duty to vote for Bush. Otherwise, you know, the terrorists have won.
In a better world, the right thing to do here would be for Republicans and Democrats to agree, in advance, that neither side will attempt to make political hay out of circumstances surrounding another terrorist attack on the U.S. before the election.
I can’t help thinking, though, that such a move would really be unilateral disarmament on the Democratic side — because the Bush administration has broken every promise it has ever made about not turning terrorism into a political football. Since the war on terror is the only issue on which polls show Bush with any remaining appeal to the American public, it has become the administration’s political cornerstone. And it is being micromanaged for Bush’s personal political advantage.
Here’s Tom Ridge, touting the glories of the president’s policies out of one side of his mouth and insisting that his Homeland Security Department “doesn’t do politics” out of the other! When all accounts suggest that it was an oversensitivity to political winds that led our intelligence astray in the Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco, here’s the new choice to head the CIA — a partisan GOP bulldog! And don’t you Democrats dare oppose him, or we’ll hang you by your obstructionist thumbs!
No, I don’t think it’s possible, given these players, to steer the debate onto the high road and keep it there. Instead, we’d all better keep on high alert between now and Nov. 2 — not only for possible attacks, which remain a true danger, but for the outrageous distortions of the American political process that could result from them.
Of course, we can be thankful for little things: At least the trial balloon of postponing elections in the event of a terror attack seems to have been definitively exploded.
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