Bob McCarty Writes

I may have found the source of the “October Surprise” Republican presidential nominee John McCain is likely to unveil during the next eight days.  And I found it in my own backyard.  Almost.

On Tuesday, 66-year-old school bus driver Odell Stukes Jr. learned he can’t wear his Barack Obama cap on the job.  In turn, the employee of the Fort Zumwalt School District northwest of St. Louis — a public school district, mind you — contacted the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, according to a report in the Suburban Journals yesterday.

So why did Stukes, an African-American man described in the newspaper report as a 21-year Army veteran who serves as chaplain at VFW Post 5077 in O’Fallon, Mo., take such a stand?  It couldn’t have been because of the school district’s policy (below), could it?

“No employee will use school system facilities, equipment, or supplies in connection with campaigning; nor will the employee use any time during the working day for campaigning purposes.”

The policy seems pretty clear to me:  The act of wearing an Obama hat — or a McCain hat for that matter — during the heat of a presidential campaign season clearly constitutes “campaigning” on the part of Stukes.  To say otherwise would be equivalent to concluding that a person wearing a Tampa Bay Rays hat during the week of the World Series was not showing his support for the upstart American League champions.  In other words, that would be foolish.

Perhaps, like his fellow Army veteran Collin Powell, Stukes is putting the race card on the table.  Because I don’t know Stukes, I cannot confirm or refute that as a possibility.  So let’s move on to the third and most-likely reason — one I reached based upon the preponderance of the available evidence.

I suspect that Stukes is the driver of the bus under which the Democratic Party presidential nominee has thrown so many of his most-ardent supporters — 56 so far — during the past two years.

By using this roundabout attention-getting approach, he hopes to make the location of his bus known to the folks behind McCain’s White House bid.  In turn, he hopes those folks — after locating the bus and the under-the-bus dwellers beneath it, that is — will be able to dig up some last-minute dirt on Obama and shape it into something the Arizona senator can use as the “October Surprise” that turns the election in his favor.

I know it’s a stretch, but stranger things have happened, haven’t they?.  If it turns out to be right, I’ll write a book about it.

Stay tuned.