Politics

The latest Republican gimmick is to split the difference on income-tax rates between the current rate of 35 percent and the Clinton-era rate of 39.6 – and with substantial cuts in government spending. This is the solution the pilots of an earlier generation might call “coming home on a wing and a prayer.”

There’s no indication that President Obama will bite, nor is there any reason why, from his point of view, he should. He has read the fear in Republican eyes and he’s willing – maybe eager – to jump off the cliff in the sure and certain confidence that with the compliant mainstream media at his back, he can successfully pin the blame on the Republicans for the consequences.

He can even promise spending cuts, secure in the knowledge that he won’t have to actually make them. Promises are a sucker’s game, and there’s no shortage of suckers. Mr. Obama clearly wants to humiliate the Republicans – re-election was not enough – and he and his Democratic allies think his victory on Nov. 6 arms him with a mandate to do as he pleases.

There’s no longer an argument over whether to raise taxes, only by how much. Some of the Republicans eager to cave now and get the details of surrender out of the way talk bravely of demanding spending cuts as the price of higher taxes to finance the president’s big-spending schemes, but they know in their hearts that actual spending cuts are a pipe dream. Raising taxes first, cut spending later, is a scheme that has never worked. Republican presidents played that shell game, too.

But Rep. David Camp of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, tells Politico, the political daily, that he is “reserving judgment” on such a scheme. “It depends on the entire package,” he says. “What are the spending [cuts] going to be? You can’t consider that on its own without looking at all the other factors that might go into it.” We can take that as a probable yes, as soon as everybody indulges in a little more big talk.

Rep. Nan Hayworth of New York sounds ready to quit now, with a few goodbye clichés. “There’s certainly a movement among us to accept that we indeed may have to not let perfect be the enemy of the good. If we can truly get a visionary plan, then I think we will certainly be happy to give that the most thoughtful consideration.”

The Republicans, including the speaker, are negotiating as if they actually believe that President Obama is negotiating in good faith. The speaker’s offer of $800 billion in new taxes sank without a salute. The president insists on soaking “the rich,” even though the most thorough soaking wouldn’t yield enough to make a sizable dent in either debt or deficit. But it satisfies Mr. Obama’s cult of covetousness, cupidity and spite, which dreams of a scorched-earth class war, and would redeem all his speeches from the president’s community-organizing days.

Mr. Obama called in the Business Roundtable this week for a little charm offensive. He told them that he’s rooting for the success of big business because when big business does well, “then small businesses and medium-sized businesses up and down the chain are doing well.” Someone should explain to the president that a strong economy is based on the jobs generated by small business, not big.

He repeated his mantra that only he holds the key to recovery. “What’s holding us back right now,” he told the assembled CEOs, “is a lot of stuff that is going on in this town. And I know that many of you have come here to try to see, is there any way we can break through this logjam. Nobody wants to get this done more than me.”

Just do it his way. Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, seems unimpressed. “An obsession to raise taxes isn’t going to solve the problem. We can’t just keep borrowing money and raising taxes and expecting the problem to go away. That is our point to the president.”

That’s precisely beside the president’s point. He has bigger plans at Fiscal Cliff.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

“Susan Rice is extraordinary,” the president told his Cabinet as he convened its first session since he was re-elected. “Couldn’t be prouder of the job she’s done.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, no doubt grateful that she had not been elected to scapegoathood, led the round of applause for Miss Rice.

Spreading his cloak across the mud hole, however much it was offered in the spirit of Sir Walter, is not likely to keep the little lady’s feet dry. But it’s the least a gentleman, or even someone pretending to be a gentleman, could do for a scapegoat of the president’s own making.

Neither the ambassador’s critics in the U.S. Senate nor the toothless tigers of the mainstream media have wanted to ask the question that has been begging to be asked since the tragedy broke on Sept. 11: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” The two amigos – John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina – have been joined by Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire in pursuing Miss Rice, just as the White House wants them to do. That’s how shell games work.

Mr. Obama is a master of sleight-of-hand, though it’s true that he might be working with easy marks, willing to be rolled. As long as the president can keep the anger of the amigos and their colleagues in the Senate focused on the ladies in his cabinet, he’ll suffer no pain. Miss Rice emerged from her meeting with the three amigos unchastened, though the amigos were said to be angry and frustrated, but wouldn’t say why. It’s likely that Miss Rice did not show the proper respect, not having the usual forelock to tug.

The rap on Susan Rice is mostly that she’s arrogant, vulgar, disrespectful and full of herself, qualities which may not endear her to others but hardly set her apart in Washington, where humility and modesty are not often highly regarded. She does not have a reputation for any of those nice qualities. She once shot the late Richard Holbrooke, widely admired in several diplomatic posts, including the one Miss Rice holds now, the middle-finger salute during a meeting of senior staff at the State Department.

She mocked Sen. McCain (as well as Hillary Clinton) mercilessly in the first Obama campaign. She derided his fact-finding trip to Iraq in 2008 as “strolling around the market in a flak jacket” and said he had a “tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.” Senators, who often have egos as big as elephants, have elephantine memories to match. Remembering affronts is natural.

“She can be a most undiplomatic diplomat,” observes Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, “and there likely aren’t enough Republican or Democratic votes in the Senate to confirm her.”

But keeping attention focused on Susan Rice, as tempting as such a target for “unexpended ordnance” might be, as a fighter pilot would put it, is what the amigos must do. Miss Rice’s role in Benghazi is small beer.

The president, in fact, may feel a few pangs of male guilt for sending out an unarmed woman to do what he should have done. Miss Rice insisted in her round of Sunday-morning television interviews, five days after the American ambassador was killed, that the attack was Muslim revenge for that infamous video that almost nobody saw. The president knew better: just two days after the attack, he was told by his intelligence briefers, armed with communications intercepts, that members of the mob had intimate connections to al-Qaeda. Someone should inquire why the president didn’t tell Miss Rice about that before he dispatched her to that unhappy place beneath the bus – and why the ambassador in Benghazi had to pay with his life for her ticket.

The “facts” – which hardly rose even to the level of “factoids” – collided with the Obama campaign’s fairy tale that the commander in chief, with his very own trigger finger, had already finished off al-Qaeda once and for all.

The questions crying out for asking were the questions familiar to top-level Washington scandal, “what did the president know, and when did he know it?” Mr. Obama has invited his Senate inquisitors to “go after me,” not the little lady at the U.N. The three amigos choose their weapons.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times

The giants of Congress when Congress was respected – and, more important, feared – by nearly everyone, were mostly Democrats, and Southern Democrats besides.

So there’s no surprise now that Barack Obama, armed with a well-fitting suit, well-shined shoes, a gift of gab and a unique skill at hijacking America for extended guilt trips, is about to roll the Republicans at the lip of Fiscal Cliff.

Several Republicans who were breathing fire (or at least an occasional puff of smoke) only yesterday, loudly proclaiming themselves warrior heroes in the war on irresponsible spending and the evils of big government, are searching now for something white to run up the regimental flagstaff.

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia – what passes now for stalwart Republicans – have signaled to the White House that now that they’ve got the speechifying off their chests, they’re ready to do what they said they would never do. They want to relieve the president of any notion that he’ll have to offer something in return for their help to raise taxes. A pat on the head would be nice, but not necessary.

Republicans are brought up to believe that it’s always easier to switch than fight, and better manners besides. Making noise, even to call a lifeguard when someone is drowning, is a breach of pool-side etiquette.

Nearly everyone understands that something must be done about the national debt and the mortgage on America held by China, lest Barack Obama and the Democrats turn America into Greece without the garlic. This might even require a combination of selected tax increases and deep cuts in spending, particularly cuts in the entitlements that have reduced large swaths of the population – Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” – to waiting for government checks, drawn on the public’s bank account.

But a surrender before negotiations begin is a craven and silly strategy. The November election results have frightened many Republican politicians who read daily prescriptions for Republican recovery in the New York Times and the Washington Post and conclude that the only strategy for winning like Democrats must be sex-change surgery.

Saxby Chambliss, for one prominent example, led the flight from the sound of the guns, renouncing his no-new-taxes pledge even before hearing an Obama promise to cut spending. In the past, such Democratic promises haven’t been worth much. Mr. Chambliss is an experienced sunshine soldier.

He took military deferments during the Vietnam war, and never served; in an earlier, more robust America, this would have been called “draft-dodging.” Running later against Sen. Max Cleland, who left several arms and legs on the Vietnam battlefield, Mr. Chambliss suggested in one campaign commercial that the amputee warrior was a soulmate of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein simply because he was skeptical of the creation of the Homeland Security Administration.

The campaign commercial, over the line or not, was clever, one Republican strategist said, because it worked. John McCain, who had proved a thing or two about patriotism and raw courage in a prison cell at the notorious Hanoi Hilton, called the Chambliss commercial “worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible.”

But even Mr. McCain sometimes has trouble with what the Marines call “fire discipline,” shooting when the shooter later wishes he hadn’t. A fortnight ago, he warned President Obama not to appoint Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, as secretary of state because she led the White House cover-up of what happened in Benghazi. But now he and Miss Rice are blowing kisses at each other. Lindsey Graham, who had romped when Mr. McCain stomped, now says she only should be held “accountable” for whatever it was that she did, if she did.

Second thoughts may be better than no thoughts at all, but politicians who succeed at flying by the seat of their pants know that the climb-down from brave talk never feels as good as blowing hard in the first place.

Republicans tempted to renounce their no-tax pledges in return for a few nice words from the Democratic media should keep in mind what happened to President George Bush the elder. He invited one and all to “read my lips, no new taxes.” One and all did just that. The rest is history, about what happens to faithless politicians.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

President Obama, who demonstrated in the election just past that he’s still the tall, dark and handsome prince of feminine fantasy, stepped up manfully to defend the honor of Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations who eagerly joined the spinning of the enormous fib that the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was about a home-made video.

He didn’t say much about the specifics of the lie she told, but warned skeptics of the administration’s cockamamie excuse for the Libyan calamity to stay away from her. If certain U.S. senators want to go after somebody, he told a press conference (his first in eight months), “they should go after me, and I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received, and to besmirch her reputation, is outrageous.”

A gentleman playing dragon-slayer would have sent his seconds to call on John McCain and Lindsey Graham to offer them their choice of pistol or sword, but that’s not the way a lady’s honor is avenged in Chicago. So he growled, in the way of a Bugsy or an Al, to “come get me.” And don’t wait until St. Valentine’s Day.

Such a patronizing defense of Miss Rice would, back in the day, elicit only snorts of scorn and resentment from the likes of Bella Abzug or Gloria Steinem. A fish riding to the rescue on Miss Steinem’s bicycle could take care of a couple of senators in short order. But that was then, and we’ve got a new now.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Nancy Pelosi, just in from San Francisco, the bastion of the manly arts, sounded like a little lady herself. Miss Pelosi has yet to come to terms with the fact that she is merely a former Speaker of the House, and she had convened the Democratic women’s caucus to lift their spirits. Two more years of life in the chorus was not quite what Miss Pelosi promised them. She was not stepping down as the leader of the Democratic minority, as many of her colleagues had expected.

She first wanted to correct something she had said earlier: “I said we did not have the majority but we have the gavel. Excuse me, we don’t have the gavel. We have our own gavel. We have something more important. We have unity. We do not have the gavel, we do not have the majority. But we have unity.”

Having cleared that up, she took questions. When Luke Russert of NBC News asked how she would respond to certain of her colleagues who say that at 72 she should step aside because she’s too old, the little ladies of the caucus, flanking her on stage, hissed and booed. “Let’s for a moment honor [that] as a legitimate question,” she told the inquiring reporter, “although it’s quite offensive that you don’t realize that, I guess.”

Poor piggish clod, he got it backwards. He doesn’t know that 72 is the new 27, as any offended feminist could have told him, and all women are young and they’re all smart, clever, and beautiful besides. The ex-speaker, summoning her inner cougar, argued that “everything I have done in my almost decade now of leadership is to elect younger and newer people to the Congress.”

But this was smokescreen and subterfuge, all to distract attention from the scandal at hand, the administration’s bungling of the tragedy in Libya. John McCain got it right, that Mr. Obama is guilty of either cover-up or incompetence. Instead of offering to punch John McCain and Lindsey Graham in the nose on behalf of Susan Rice, the president could explain why he sent her to the U.N. armed only with a lie or with “intelligence” he knew was bogus.

The president’s native eloquence has gotten him out of jams with ladies all his life, and he has not yet learned that the buck (and the bunk) stops with him. He has been encouraged to think he is immune from reality by his Chicago pals, his rich Hollywood friends and donors, party hacks, and by the scribbler class, which wants only to caress and coddle -- and shut up anyone with a question. But reality is not a lady, unimpressed by election returns, and ultimately demands a full accounting of swindle and deceit.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Losing an election always hurts; winning hurts the other guys, which is why winning is so sweet. This one hurts conservatives a lot, and it’s particularly painful for those with unrealistic great expectations.

Pessimists abound. Rep. Ron Paul, who holds the North American franchise for pessimism, says we no longer have to worry about the “fiscal cliff” because we’re already lie in the rocks and weeds at the bottom of Gruesome Gulch. Rep. John Boehner, the speaker of the House, who promised defiantly on election eve to hang tough on the Republican mantra of “no new taxes” even if the president were to be re-elected, now sounds not so sure.

Some of the more prominent conservative pundits are on their way to New York City in search of a building high enough to jump out of. Rush Limbaugh went to bed on Election Night “thinking we had lost the country, I don’t know how else you look at this.” Sean Hannity told his Fox News audience that he wouldn’t succumb to depression but it looks like to him like America is “no longer the center-right country that it once was” and “has been conditioned to be an entitlement society.” If that’s not depression it’s a reasonable facsimile of it. When Ann Coulter, the prolific author and pundit who writes exclusively in purple ink, told talk-show hostess Laura Ingraham that the nation is now interested only in handouts, “There is no hope.”

Miss Ingraham told her: “Pep up, move forward, girl.” Good advice. It’s easy for anyone to be misled by the media, whose patron saint is Chicken Little. The media covers politics the way television “journalists” cover the weather: all panic all the time. They can’t help it, it’s all they know. The coverage often reminds me of my devout grandmother, beyond elderly when she called me in tears one day many years ago to tell me that “God is dead, they just announced it on the television.”

We’ve read obituaries for the political parties and philosophies before. The Republican Party was doomed to an unmourned grave after LBJ dispatched Barry Goldwater in 1964; eight years later Richard Nixon won 49 states and the Republicans and Democrats traded places in oblivion. Jimmy Carter was the author of Democratic renaissance in 1976, but the renaissance faded in just four years and Ronald Reagan won 49 states in 1984. The Democrats were sent back to the graveyard. Anyone who believed everything he read would have imagined the landscape littered with the bloated corpses of the two not-so-great political parties. The corpses always got up to dance again.

The problem with lugubrious morning-after analysis is that it’s nearly always wrong. Everything always looks different later. Barack Obama is entitled to a little basking – he won, fair and square – but he’ll need the remembrance of how good it once felt. Second terms are never as much fun as presidents expect them to be. You could ask Messrs Nixon, Reagan and Clinton. Mr. Nixon was chased out of office, Iran-Contra exploded in the Gipper’s face like a trick cigar, and Bubba was impeached with only the consolations of a comely White House intern.

The conservatives misled themselves about what America thought of a president who had inherited a bad economy and made it worse. Americans have retreated to two echo chambers, where everyone competes to see who can say the most incendiary things about the opposition. Some conservatives couldn’t give up the notion that the president is a secret Kenyan communist; liberals couldn’t give up the notion that everyone who opposes the president is a secret Ku Kluxer, listening for the dog whistle to send them into the streets in search of the lynch mob. The echo chamber where everyone gets his “news,” filtered through ignorant and often inexperienced “journalists” unchallenged by an editor with a blue pencil and looking for opportunities to use it, reinforces silly notions.

The election did not settle much of anything. We’re still a center-right country with a president of diminished popularity (his 7-point victory in 2008 shrank to 2 points this year), a closely divided Senate where Republicans can still work the rules to derail radical legislation, and a House with enough Republicans to prevail against the worst that Democrats can devise.

The game is still on. Conservatives have the persuasive case to make, but invective, insult, rant and rave won’t do it. Reasoned argument will. This goes for Democrats, too. They should remember the infallible Pruden Principle: Nothing recedes like success. History proves it.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

As American campaigns go, this one has been lively but not particularly vicious, unless you’re Mitt Romney and accused of dooming. He was accused of dooming one woman to death by cancer, and plotting to doom a young unmarried law student to birthing lots of babies by cutting off her supply of government condoms. It was never clear how many she needed, or how often.

That’s the sweetness of campaigns: politicians never have to be very clear. If you can work murder or sex into an accusation, it becomes believable, and if you can work both into the narrative, you can count on it going “viral” and a lot of people will see and hear it, and, best of all, repeat it.

The campaign was painful to President Obama, who slept through the first debate -- and when he woke up, he looked like he had banged his head on the rafters in the rarified places where presidents live. Messiahs, even minor-league messiahs from the south side of Chicago, usually don’t have to explain themselves. He dreams dreams of sugar plums and Big Bird, and if he has nightmares about the great betrayal of his ambassador in Benghazi, there’s always someone around him to say it never happened. He can (and probably will) blame George W. Bush.

Still, the dainty and the delicate got off easy this time. Joe Biden saying dopey things is welcome comic relief, as in telling a rally last week that “there’s never been a day in the last four years I’ve been proud to be his vice president, not one single day.” Everyone is groggy now and we should cut Joe a little slack, and anyway, he’s not a patch on some of the vice presidents of the past. When John Adams was George Washington’s vice president, he and Thomas Jefferson once went after each other with fireplace tongs. In those more robust days, mere rhetoric was for sissies.

David McCullough, the masterful presidential historian (“John Adams” and “Truman”), thinks the charge and countercharge in the campaign of 1800 might have been the standard for mudslinging. Jefferson paid a journalist to write that Adams was a mentally unbalanced hermaphrodite, and Adams spread the word that if Jefferson won there would be murder, rape and robbery in the streets. Jefferson won, but Adams was right. Two centuries later, we’ve got murder, rape and robbery in lots of streets. (You could fact-check it.)

Connoisseurs of the rough stuff are particularly fond of the campaign of 1828. Andrew Jackson’s surrogates accused John Quincy Adams of wearing silk underwear and pimping for the czar of Russia. The Adams campaign responded by calling Jackson’s wife Rachel a whore because she married Old Hickory before she got word that divorce from her first husband was final.

Grover Cleveland was the only Democratic president between the Civil War and the end of the 19th century, admired for his stern Presbyterian rectitude, strong against corruption. But like ol’ Bubba, he had an eye for the ladies. In the campaign of 1884, the Republicans discovered that he had fathered a child before he shuffled off from Buffalo, where he was the mayor. He admitted that he had paid child support to the child’s mother, though later it turned out that he admitted paternity because he was the only bachelor among several of the lady’s “good and dear friends.” A preacher’s son, he was a true gallant.

The Republican gaffe patrol (on patrol in balloons in those days) raised the most famous mocking chant in presidential politics: “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” When the votes were counted and Cleveland had defeated James G. Blaine, “the continental liar from the state of Maine,” the triumphant Democrats shouted their answer: “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”

The cleverest thing a president could think to say about his opponent this year was that Mitt couldn’t tell the difference between a battleship and a bayonet, or that he wants to kill that big imaginary bird. But in the days of yore, the pols were sometimes poets. All we have now are pollsters, pundits and campaign consultants.
Well, it’s time to vote, go home and shut up. Further disturbing the peace should be a felony.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

October has come and gone with no surprise, with just a slow, plodding accumulation of signs and portents suggesting that “the One” who has come will soon be gone.

The polls are tight and the numbers are steady, but it begins to feel like 1980 again, when a tight race between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan broke open over the last weekend. His own pollsters went to Mr. Jimmy and Miss Rosalynn on Monday morning to tell them that “the numbers just aren’t there.”

If President Obama has taken such a meeting, there’s no hint of it. Both the Obama and Romney camps naturally predict victory, but the president’s men are a little more emphatic than their numbers warrant, which suggests they may be working hard to keep hope alive.

Mr. Obama will close his campaign Monday where it all started, with a rally in Des Moines after stops in Wisconsin and Ohio. The attention he’s paying to states he had locked up a fortnight ago tells a lot about how the campaign ends. Iowa can contribute only six votes to what the president expected would be a landslide.

The president has been to Iowa 11 times this year; Mr. Romney will make his 14th visit with a rally in Dubuque on Saturday. He will close on Monday in New Hampshire, fighting for four electoral votes. It may be a poetic way to end a long and contentious marathon, but sentiment has nothing to do with it. Neither man would be struggling in the dying hours of the campaign for nickels and dimes if the race were a settled issue.

The latest Iowa polls show an exceedingly tight race: A Marist poll, out Thursday, gives the president a 6-point lead, and a poll by the University of Iowa of the day before shows the president ahead only by 42.7 percent to 41 percent. Fighting for fractions is no portent of a landslide.

Nevertheless, some wise heads say they see the signs of a dramatic and decisive break toward the challenger. The important swing states, particularly Ohio, may have swung. Dick Morris, the campaign consultant turned pundit who invented Bill Clinton in Arkansas and in two presidential campaigns, has turned caution aside to speak of landslide, though he calls it a vote of “historic proportions.”

The campaign has reached a tipping point and it goes back to the first debate. “Reasonable voters saw that the voice of hope and optimism and positivism was Romney while the president was only a nitpicking, quarrelsome, negative figure,” he says. “The contrast does not work in Obama’s favor.”

Indeed. The Obama campaign spent a hundred million dollars on television advertising to paint Mitt Romney as an evil Wall Street villain, lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills, making the kids’ dog ride on the roof of the car. He was the kind of villain who would shoot Big Bird and serve it for supper with imported champagne. Then came the first debate, revealing Mitt Romney as an ordinary rich guy with beer and hamburger tastes like the rest of us. The president revealed himself spoiled and petulant, in a pout for his teleprompter and barely able to hide his irritation at having to answer questions like any other candidate. It’s been uphill for him since.

Mr. Romney slowly overtook the president in the polls, and has held a small but consistent advantage since. Over the past week, by the reckoning of the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Romney has led in 19 of 31 national surveys, the president in only 7. Mr. Romney’s percentage has been above 50 percent in 10 of those polls, Mr. Obama's in none.

“It comes down to numbers,” Karl Rove, the genius of George W. Bush’s two successful campaigns, writes in the Wall Street Journal. “And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney.”

Soon enough none of these numbers, accurate or not, will matter. We’ll vote and that will settle it. Only one prediction here: The electoral college, as it nearly always does, will follow the popular vote, and national popular vote will outperform the polls.

The polls have been skewed by fear. The mainstream media has been relentless with its message, abetted in ways large and small by the Obama campaign, that only bigots, churls and haters would vote against a black incumbent. This is the ultimate racism, that a failed black incumbent can’t be held to account like a failed white incumbent.

Numbers can lie, of course, but if President Obama pulls this one out, the numbers have told a whopper.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Television editors and reporters and some of our flightiest politicians have abandoned the presidential campaign for more frightful stuff. They’re determined, as usual, to make something bad a lot worse.

The tone of the coverage, not of the storm but of the wait for the storm, ranges from “excited” to “hysterical.” A tsunami warning was canceled Sunday for Hawaii, but you might think if it could squeeze through the Panama Canal and make a few sharp turns out of the Gulf of Mexico it would threaten Manhattan. Mayor Michael Bloomberg could have taken that possibility into account -- or maybe by shutting down the trains and subways he was preventing thirsty evil-doers in Manhattan from traveling into the 'burbs to find a man-sized soda pop.

This time, the threat to the Atlantic coast was real, but “television news” in times of peril invites both skepticism and hysteria. Usually, but not always. When Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is nobody’s nanny, speaks, everybody has to listen: “Don’t be stupid. Get out!”

We like to think of America as the land of the big shoulders, hog butcher for the world, stacker of wheat – stormy, husky and brawling. That’s in fair weather. Carl Sandburg wouldn’t recognize men at the supermarkets grabbing as many rolls of toilet paper as grubby hands can hold. The supermarkets typically run out of quilted, super absorbent and extra fluffy first, which tells us something sad about “the fearfulest generation.” Rain, wind or shine, the Sears and Roebuck catalog, slick and glossy paper stock or not, was good enough for “the greatest generation.” Not ours.

In Washington, where shoulders are rarely as big and broad as those in Chicago or Pittsburgh or Albuquerque, a frightened stacker of paper (not wheat) is more likely to die under the wheels of a speeding grocery cart than in the embrace of a hurricane.

Excited talk of potential tracks, storm cones, computer models, water-vapor loops and tidal cycles diverted attention from the Romney surge and settled attention on the storm surge. And just in time, too, since the mainstream media does not like to talk about unhappy campaign trends and cycles. Nevertheless, the New York Times, which often resembles the media arm of the Democratic National Committee, is reluctantly altering its trend lines, conceding subtly that there may be something worse than wind and water dead ahead for the Chicago messiah.

Grim men are huddled in basements in Chicago and Boston, oblivious to all winds but those blowing through their computer models. The trend – “momentum” is a word that dare not speak its name – clearly lies with Romney as the campaign enters the final week. Anxiety reigns. Romney wise men are anxious that the dramatic break toward their man is overdue. The national polls, showing Mr. Romney with leads of 3 to 6 points and running even or better with the president in Ohio and the swing states, are mostly beyond the margin of error. But the needle has barely moved for the past week.

“Some of us are asking whether we peaked too soon,” one Romney operative tells me. “We don’t think so, but we’re ready for Nov. 7 to come and be gone.”

The great fear at Obama headquarters, one operative tells the New York Times, “is that a large number of voters suddenly will get so fed up with the back and forth of the campaign, the economic outlook and the partisan rancor that they break for Romney if only to try something new.”

Even the president couldn’t blame those “large numbers of voters” for wanting to try something new. His campaign has been wallowing in trivia, trifle and titillation for days. First it was manufactured outrage over an imaginary bird, then a “war on women” that frightens only embittered feminist spinsters, and a running obsession with sex. The president’s promise of free condoms for women has given way to a cheap TV commercial urging the young female voter to treat her first-time vote as something like losing her virginity, and she should reward Barack Obama with her innocence. “Your first time,” confides Hollywood literary celeb Lena Dunham, her voice dribbling warm ooze, “shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy. It should be with a guy . . . who really cares about and understands women.”

Surely not a guy who promises everything and four years later hasn’t delivered anything. A guy who didn’t even send thank-you pansies and forget-me-nots on the morning after. What a rotter.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

It's the season of the October surprise.

If you see a woman in red it's probably Gloria Allred, the Los Angeles lawyer for scorned women just arrived from hell with their furies and long memories. Mzz Allred promised the president she had a doozie for this October. The doozie so far looks like only bitter recriminations of a scorned floozie, but the October surprise season is still young.

Mzz Allred is peddling the story of a contentious divorce of 25 years ago, and paints Mitt Romney as the villain of the piece because he testified for the husband about the value of stock shares in the settlement, which the wife agreed to and later decided she didn't like.

This tastes like pretty thin soup, something the National Enquirer might have found in a musty bound volume in the basement of the court house. Husbands and wives have been known to shout in Divorce Court. That's about the value of a kitchen sink. You heave it over the side and hope it hits somebody. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.

The origin of the October surprise lies in the 1968 campaign, when Lyndon Johnson announced a "peace breakthrough" in Vietnam and halted the bombing of North Vietnam to guarantee an end of the war and "co-incidentally" assure the triumph of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The veep got a little bounce but Richard Nixon won by a margin of less than a percentage point.

Four years later, the Vietnam war was still alive and well and Mr. Nixon and George McGovern were fighting it out over who could end it. On Oct. 26, just 12 days before the November election, Henry Kissinger, the president's national-security guru, announced that "peace is at hand." Peace, such as it was, would wait for three more years, but Mr. Nixon won 49 states and defeated Mr. Magoo by 20 points. The president would have won, anyway, but "peace is at hand" might have contributed to the landslide.

In late October 1980, the Iranian government and President Jimmy Carter announced that it wouldn't release the American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran until after the November election. This was not much of a surprise, but it fed fevered speculation in Washington that the Reagan campaign had made a secret deal with Iran to delay their release to avoid giving Mr. Carter the happy surprise. There was actually a January surprise, when the hostages were released minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office. The controversy over what had happened lasted for years, but two congressional investigations concluded there was no deal, and best of all, we didn't have to give the hostages back.

The vultures were not finished. Caspar Weinberger, the defense secretary for Ronald Reagan, was accused of criminal complicity in a deal to send missiles to fight Saddam Hussein, which he opposed, and a special prosecutor with not much to show for his investigation pursued Mr. Weinberger after he left office, and indicted him on the eve of the 1992 election, hoping to prevent George H.W. Bush's re-election. Mr. Bush was defeated and gave Mr. Weinberger a full pardon the day before he left office.

Since then, the October surprises have become smaller stuff. On the eve of the 2000 election there was the news that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving 24 years earlier, when he was young and callow. He won anyway. Eight years after that, The Associated Press discovered that Barack Obama's aged Aunt Zeituni Onyango was living in Boston as an illegal immigrant from Kenya. Her nephew won anyway.

This year the October surprises, such as they are, are -- so far -- even less consequential. Donald Trump promised something about Barack Obama's college transcripts if the president would release them for a $5 million contribution to his favorite charity. A man went to the Romney campaign with "proof" that Mr. Obama scored cocaine hits in college and the Romney campaign told him to get lost.

All we've seen this year are frail skeletons from closets long since abandoned, and Gloria Allred's well-done nothingburger from an ancient divorce proceeding. She should stick to chasing more promising ambulances. One of them might have a kitchen sink inside.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

On the morning after the third and mercifully last presidential debate, nearly all the major polls show the race tied or Mr. Romney narrowly ahead. The Gallup Poll, the oldest such, dating from 1936, shows a Romney lead of 6 points, well outside the margin of error.

Five of the eight major polls averaged Monday by RealClearPolitics.com show Mr. Romney up by margins ranging from 2 to 6 points. The polls in the important swing states, particularly Ohio, are drawing close as well.

We’ve reached the tipping point in the campaign, when voters become bored with the blah blah and want most to be put out of their misery. The constant barrage of television commercials has made it unsafe to turn on a TV set lest a viewer get caught in the crossfire between Channel 7 and Channel 4. There’s a public-opinion poll to suit every partisan hope for change: If you don’t like Battleground there’s Quinnipiac. If your taste runs to something more imaginative, there are polls by Zogby, a dozen colleges and maybe even one somewhere by the Sharia School of Law and Anglo-Saxon Jurisprudence. Everybody wants to know who won, even if we haven’t got there yet.

What is clear is that we’re as divided as we ever were, and there’s scant hope for a landslide that settles once and for all what kind of country we want to be. We had a blowout election in 1972, when George McGovern lost 49 states, winning only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, and here we are again. It’s called democracy, and ours is particularly noisy, robust, unpredictable – and long-running.

Loser or not, no one ever put an asterisk against George McGovern’s origins deep in America’s heartland, his unreserved love for his native land or his courage under fire. He flew a B-24 Liberator on more than two dozen bombing missions against the Nazis, twice bringing his battered ship home on a wing and a prayer. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal and went home to South Dakota to marry his high-school sweetheart, Eleanor, who, like so many young women of those years, waited, afraid to take a deep breath, for her soldier’s return home from the hill. He studied for the Methodist ministry at Dakota Wesleyan College, where no one tried to destroy his faith, and later reluctantly traded the cloth for politics. But he never abandoned Christ’s commandment to look after the poor, the hungry, “the least of these.”

I ribbed him unmercifully in my column for his sometimes-goofy left-wing politics, the presidential candidate who had sealed his fate as big-time loser when he proclaimed that he would “crawl on my knees to Hanoi” to end the Vietnam War. There’s just something about bowing and crawling that Americans don’t like. He wrote to me occasionally to needle The Times for the editorials and for things I wrote. One day my phone rang and a familiar voice said: “This is the man you call ‘Mr. Magoo,” and I’d like to ask you to lunch.” We became friends, neither of us softening the other’s politics, but Baptist and Methodist preachers' sons talking politics, war, peace and sometimes a little theology. He was regarded by Democrat, Republican, liberal and conservative alike as one of the most decent men in the United States Senate. I soon understood why.

Mr. Magoo, who died Sunday, age 90, had the rare gift of humility. When he learned as a Connecticut innkeeper how government regulators conspire to thwart a businessman’s thrift and industry, he ruefully conceded in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that if he had known first-hand about the difficulties the government imposes, “that knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender.” (Such good advice for Barack Obama.)

He once recalled how a man and a little boy came up to him at the Minneapolis airport a few days after the 49-state blowout of ’72. “I voted for you and I’m really sorry how it turned out,” the man told him. Then the little boy of about 7 piped up: “Yeah, but don’t feel bad. Coming in second is pretty good.”

Mr. Magoo, R.I.P.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.