Election terrors.

When Homeland Security head Tom Ridge said in early August that his department "doesn't do politics," it was hard to take him seriously, especially since, when announcing a heightened terror alert two days before, he praised President Bush for his stewardship of the war on terror.

Ridge can't have it both ways.

While it was impossible to know exactly what to make of that terror alert, these guys in the White House "do politics" whenever they breathe.

They've got two bad habits: incompetence and dishonesty. It was difficult to know which one was in play this time.

It could have been incompetence. Ridge simply may not have gotten his story straight the first time he gave us the news. Initially, the Homeland Security folks said they had information that Al Qaeda was doing test runs at the Prudential tower in Newark and that Al Qaeda may be doing ongoing surveillance of the World Bank, the IMF, Citicorp, and the New York Stock Exchange. Then they backtracked, saying that most of the intelligence was three or four years old. Then they turned around and said that some of the information was as current as this January.

Understandably, the American public felt like it was getting yanked around. At the very least, when the Administration has alarming information to pass on, it ought to get all its facts nailed down so that we, as citizens, can act accordingly.

But forgive us for being at least somewhat skeptical.

At one previous alert, Attorney General John Ashcroft said he had serious evidence of a terror threat, and he hadn't even informed Ridge, who said it was nothing new once he found out about it.

Beyond that, here is an Administration that lied to us about the intelligence it was using as a basis for launching the Iraq War.

Here is an Administration that boasted about rolling out the propaganda for that war as if it were a new product to sell.

And here is an Administration that has a no-holds-barred approach to winning elections, as the Florida debacle in 2000 illustrated, to say nothing of Tom DeLay and his gerrymanderers in Texas.

There may be no low that this crowd will not stoop to.

Credibility is a nonrenewable resource. And these guys have used theirs up.

This credibility vacuum comes at a high cost. If the warning is genuine and citizens don't take it seriously, they may make choices that put themselves in needless danger. (The odd aspect about every heightened alert is the Bush Administration's insistence that people keep going about their everyday lives when a rational response would be to stay home or flee to safer ground.) And after so many alerts, the police and the FBI may have a difficult time distinguishing what is truly a serious and imminent threat from what may be a hyped one. After a while, the intensity of their efforts may naturally flag, which would make us all more vulnerable.

We are entering the final stages of this Presidential election with the distinct possibility that the Administration will manipulate world events, including the war on terror, to its advantage. The New Republic reported that Administration officials had prodded Pakistan to apprehend Osama bin Laden or other senior Al Qaeda members during the time of the Democratic Convention. Many people were wondering whether it was coincidence, then, that Pakistan captured an Al Qaeda operative in July with the computer discs containing the information about the alleged threats to New York, Newark, and Washington.

And among Democrats and progressives, there is widespread suspicion that Bush will order a full-scale operation to drag bin Laden out of his cave just in time for Halloween. (And there is speculation, idle we believe, that Bush may already have bin Laden under wraps.)

It is perhaps the ultimate indictment of this Administration that it has acted so disgracefully up to now that such worries cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Setting aside the disgraceful manipulation of intelligence during the Bush Administration, it remains more than likely that Al Qaeda does have plans under way to attack the United States again. Anyone familiar with the 9/11 Commission Report or Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies knows that it would be unwise to underestimate Al Qaeda's capacity for nihilistic violence on a massive scale. And Al Qaeda appears to be gunning for an assault before November 2. According to a recent article by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker about Al Qaeda's violent interference in Spain's elections, it could happen here.

"A group claiming affiliation with Al Qaeda" warned in an Arabic paper in London that it might be targeting the United States in this election season, Wright reported. "We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections," the group wrote, adding that Bush's "idiocy and religious fanaticism" help to stir up support for Al Qaeda in the Islamic world, The New Yorker story said.

Even under normal circumstances, an incumbent President has enormous advantages. In a time of terror, those advantages multiply. He can publicize threats that have been on his desk for months. He can order the scouring of intelligence so he can present fresh evidence of an attack. He can deploy the 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to go on a last ditch hunt for bin Laden. And he can call a press conference at a moment's notice or give a solemn speech to the nation that sends fear down the spine of the body politic.

It is likely that another terrorist attack against the United States would boost Bush's electoral prospects, as many citizens would probably rally around their commander in chief. Terrorism is Bush's only card to play right now. On almost every other issue, he is way down in the polls. So an attack could strengthen him where he is strongest, and could convince the few remaining undecided voters that he deserves to stay in the White House after all.

One of the ironies of the moment is that the risk of terrorism that is helping Bush this election season is greater now because of Bush's own flawed policies. His foolish, reckless war on Iraq and his unconditional support for Ariel Sharon of Israel have devastated America's reputation in the Arab and Muslim world and have swelled the ranks of terrorists. He has a static, finite view of who our enemies are. In the drawer of his Oval Office desk, he keeps a list of top Al Qaeda leaders and crosses their names off after they are captured or killed. But what he doesn't seem to realize is that he is creating more terrorists faster than he is killing them.

Bush's response to any prospective attack is not without career risk. He could fumble on camera again, as he did notoriously at the elementary school in Florida on September 11. Or he could misidentify who the real culprits are, a move that did in Spain's Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.

In either of those circumstances, Bush's election chances could dwindle.

This assumes, of course, that there actually will be an election November 2.

DeForest B. Soaries, Bush's appointed head of the Election Assistance Commission, wrote Ridge in June for guidelines on how and when to cancel of reschedule our national elections in the event of a terrorist strike. He even floated the idea that his commission should be authorized to make such a momentous decision.

The commission, Soaries wrote to Ridge, "has unique subject matter expertise in elections that we would be pleased to contribute."

Ridge was slow to disavow the idea. He said that Al Qaeda was planning to disrupt "our democratic process," and he asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what the legal procedures were for postponing the elections. Once this story broke, opposition on Capitol Hill was immediate, intense, and bipartisan.

"To even consider postponing our elections, the most ardent symbol of American democracy, because of threats made by terrorists would be nothing short of allowing fear to rule our country," said Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California.

On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, Republican Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi said, "I can't imagine a scenario where we would put an election off: They could be bombing us and we would keep voting."

Soaries himself had to back down. "There are no circumstances that could justify the postponement of cancellation" of the election, he said during the firestorm. So the plan appears to be shelved--at least for now.

But the very notion that they were considering postponing the election should give us pause.

Part of the problem with the way Bush has been waging the war on terror is that his rhetoric makes it appear as though America has never been so threatened. But that is not the case. Our country was much more in peril during the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War than it is now. And we still had elections during these conflicts.

Here is the wisdom of Abe Lincoln on the folly of canceling elections when in crisis. On November 10, 1864, just days after his reelection, he wrote: "The present rebellion brought our republic to a severe test; and a Presidential election occurring in regular course during the rebellion added not a little to the strain.... But the election was a necessity. We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone, a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."

A cloud of suspicion hangs over the republic. There is so much uncertainty in the air, not even so much about who will win and who will lose, but about threshold questions: Will we, as a nation, be attacked prior to the vote? Will our votes be accurately counted, and will the Executive Branch hang on to power by hook or by crook?

Over the medium term, it appears that we, as citizens of the United States, will have to contend with the shadow of terrorism. We aren't the first democracy that has had to deal with this. Britain has. India has. Spain has. Israel has. The odds that Al Qaeda will strike again are high. And it won't take such a sophisticated plot as 9/11 to do grievous damage. As we remain in this under-alert period, we need, all the more, to protect our fundamental freedoms: of speech, of assembly, of religion, of privacy. And we must insist that no one messes with the most basic element of democracy: our electoral process.

Let us hope that this profoundly undemocratic crowd in the White House--a crowd more hostile to our basic freedoms than any since Richard Nixon sat in the Oval Office alone and drunk--has a shred of respect for our Constitution so it won't go ahead and cancel the elections or rig the results. And if it tries to pull something like this, of if it grossly manipulates the war on terror to serve its crass political ends, we will need to get into the streets as never before to defend the very essence of our democratic system.