{"id":2735,"date":"2004-10-11T12:46:01","date_gmt":"2004-10-11T17:46:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2735.html"},"modified":"2004-10-11T12:46:01","modified_gmt":"2004-10-11T17:46:01","slug":"the-name-the-october-surprise-contest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-name-the-october-surprise-contest\/","title":{"rendered":"The ‘Name the October Surprise’ contest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Talk of an “October Surprise” is a mainstay of blog speculation. This<\/a> certainly didn’t help.<\/p>\n

President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, said Wednesday that the Bush-Cheney campaign is planning some October “surprises” for challengers John Kerry and John Edwards.<\/p>\n

“We’ve got a couple of surprises that we intend to spring,” Rove told ABC radio host Sean Hannity while explaining that he intends to wage an aggressive campaign no matter what the polls show.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s plenty of worthy guesses out there as to what such a “surprise” might be. And, as luck would have it, Mark Green, the former head of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch and Public Advocate of New York City, has created, you guessed it, Name the October Surprise.com<\/a>. The basis for the contest is simple — all you have to do is provide the answer (in 100 words or less) to this question: “What do you think is a possible October Surprise that Bush will announce in order to try to win a close election?”<\/p>\n

The goal is to anticipate particular “surprises” in the hope, however small, that Bushies may shy away from what’s widely anticipated because it reeks of a political ploy. That is, I believe in preventive wars politically, not militarily.<\/p>\n

Is this contest cynical? No, just realistic. A governing elite which seems to embody Mark Twain’s axiom that “a lie gets halfway around the world before truth puts on her boots” should be presumed capable of saying or doing almost anything to hold onto power.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The best response gets to appear live on Air America radio and receives a signed copy of The Book on Bush<\/a>, which Green wrote with Eric Alterman. As political contests go, this is an amusing and poignant one, so feel free to get in on the fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Talk of an “October Surprise” is a mainstay of blog speculation. This certainly didn’t help. President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, said Wednesday that the Bush-Cheney campaign is planning some October “surprises” for challengers John Kerry and John Edwards. “We’ve got a couple of surprises that we intend to spring,” Rove told ABC radio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}