October Surprise.

It’s October, which means it’s time for a surprise. We have the whole month to see what fresh hell John McCain can think up to inflict on the voters! My hope is that the electorate is tiring of his bizarrely-run campaign, with its increasingly silly twists and turns. Let’s recap his attempted “game-changers” over the last few weeks:

1. After noticing that his attempts to interest Americans in his campaign are having less than stellar results, and as a way to divert the conversation away from the very successful Democratic Convention, McCain chooses the delightfully spunky Sarah Palin as his running mate. What a maverick! Soon America will fall in love with her just as he did when he met her yesterday!

2. Hoping to capitalize on Hurricane Gustav barreling toward the Gulf Coast, McCain, in a move soon to become his trademark, suspends the first night of the Republican Convention to make it look like he cares. He flies somewhere or other, not the Gulf Coast, to talk about how he cares while his creepy wife and the creepier First Lady hold forth at the podium back in St. Paul about how we’re all Americans. Apparently the Republicans in St. Paul just started drinking and placing ads for discreet gay sex earlier than they would have if they’d had to listen to speeches.

3. Last week, seeing the polls heading inexorably down as America is exposed to more and more examples of Sarah Palin’s incurious brand of existence, McCain decides he needs to pull out all the stops. Hearing something about a major economic crisis despite the fundamentals of the economy being “strong,” he announces that he is suspending his campaign to fly back to Washington and butt in where he’s not wanted. Even though his campaign is “suspended,” his ads continue to run and his flunkies continue to shill for him on the news programs.

4. Unable to get his party to listen to what he has to say about the bailout bill, presumably because he doesn’t know what he is saying himself anymore, he fails to muster up enough votes from the House Republicans. He issues a statement that now is not the time for blame, then 15 minutes later another one blaming the Democrats. Hedging his bets, his campaign puts out two ads simultaneously: one blaming Barack Obama for the failure of the bill’s passage, and one for its success.

Despite his best efforts to shake things up with all his “maverick” actions, McCain’s poll numbers continue to drop. Here’s hoping his next wacky stunt will be to climb back into his coffin until the election is over.

Meanwhile, tomorrow night is the vice-presidential debate, and maybe its outcome will be a surprise. Certainly the scene has been set for us, the slack-jawed public, to be pleasantly surprised when she strings two sentences together in a comprehensible manner. In the last few days, the media has been telling us that our expectations have been set low enough that any performance by Ms. Palin that doesn’t cause us to cringe far back into our sofa cushions will be cause for the Republicans to crow their victory. I’m not quite on board with that one. My expectations are low because Sarah Palin is not smart, and there’s not much she can show me to exceed them. In fact, I’m smacking my lips in anticipation of having to watch the whole thing from behind my hands.