Where’s Osama?

The election is not over, but Democrats can at least breathe easy about having avoided a dreaded October Surprise. The most likely “surprise” was an Osama bin Laden tape, similar to the one that surfaced in 2004 and which John Kerry has blamed for his loss. “[E]ven if a bin Laden tape would have narrowed the margin, it probably wouldn’t have made a winner of McCain,” Noam Scheiber writes on The New Republic’s website. “In which case it would have exposed bin Laden to be kind of impotent.” He continues: “Which is to say, bin Laden’s probably more a validator of trends than an initiator of them. Think of him as the Colin Powell of Waziristan.”