The Gospel According to the Fix: An Insider's Guide to a Less Than Holy World of Politics by Chris Cillizza
Author:Chris Cillizza [Cillizza, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Process, American Government, Political Science, Humor, Political, Topic, Elections, National
ISBN: 9780307987105
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2012-07-10T00:00:00+00:00
THE ART OF
AN OCTOBER
SURPRISE
From The Fix Political Dictionary: October surprise—a last-minute revelation that has the potential to fundamentally change the course of a political campaign.
Good (read: winning) campaigns account for everything. Every weakness of their opponent—and themselves—is researched within an inch of its life; every ad is tested in focus groups to make sure it achieves its intended result; every voter list is checked and then re-checked so that no votes are left on the table.
But as in life, it’s impossible in a campaign to account for every eventuality. And in the past decade or so it seems as if in almost every major election there is a bombshell that comes to light in the final weeks—or even days—that threatens to rewrite the narrative of the campaign. (It doesn’t always do so, but more on that later.) The October surprise has become so commonplace that political strategists begin speculating about what it will be—and politicians start fretting what it will be—as soon as Labor Day ends and the campaign officially begins.
Why has the October surprise grown so prevalent in our modern political culture? Because we are people that now expect last-minute twists—everywhere. We like misdirection in our TV shows (Lost, anyone?) and our movies (Kevin Spacey was Keyser Söze!). We always expect a hidden surprise lurking around the corner, something that will force us to reevaluate everything we thought we knew. And, of course, politics is in the habit of giving people what they want. So now we seem to have not only an October surprise in every election nowadays but also a growing belief that these “surprises” are anything but surprising—that they are, in fact, orchestrated attempts to change the course of elections. Heck, Wag the Dog was an entire movie built around the idea that a fictional president started a war in order to create a distraction from his own sex scandal!
The only way to fully understand the art of the October surprise is to trace it back to its origins. And that brings us to the 1972 presidential race between President Richard Nixon and South Dakota senator George McGovern. Nixon, elected in 1968, had spent his first four years grappling with how to bring an end to the Vietnam War that would save face for the United States. By the time 1972 rolled around, the American public had badly soured on the war, and Nixon knew that finding a way out of the conflict was the key to his chances at a second term.
And so when Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, declared in a press conference on October 26, 1972, that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam, Democrats cried foul—arguing that the timing of Kissinger’s proclamation, which had little to no antecedent, was purely political. It’s virtually impossible to prove that claim right or wrong, since Kissinger isn’t likely to own up to his motives either way. And there are powerful arguments to be made on both sides of the debate.
Supporting the Democratic point of view is the fact that peace was not, in fact, at hand.
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