Atrios wonders if another major attack on the United States before November will help or hurt the Bush election effort. I think the key variable is when it happens.

If it happens tomorrow, it'll probably hurt him enough that he won't be able to come back. He'll get a big initial spike, but if voters have seven and a half months to think about two major attacks being carried out on his watch -- and let's be honest, they wouldn't catch anybody following this attack, either -- "dangerously incompetent" is the conclusion they're going to come to.

But if it happens in late October, which I think is a lot more likely, he will coast into a second term. The short term reaction will be so irrational, again, that most voters will honestly feel like a vote for Kerry is a vote for terrorism. It's inevitable. Even I, a man who generally feels like he is far smarter than everybody else, wrote on September 13, 2001, about nervously watching the first planes to take off from Green Bay as they gradually flew out of sight. I may not have ever thought Bush did anything right, but that doesn't mean I wasn't affected deep down in my lizardbrain.

And, of course, all this talk of "voters" assumes that elections would even be held in such a situation. There's been a lot of not quite facetious talk about the Administration suspending elections, but I think this is the only circumstance in which they could legitimately get away with it. After the attack, they announce that we can't possibly hold elections so soon and that they will be held at some date in the future. And then they simply aren't.

The good news is that Spain is getting on with it, which would make such an action look even worse than it already would on the world stage. The bad news is that the Madrid attacks were obviously timed to coincide with the elections.