Al Qaeda’s leader won’t be on the ballot in November—but America’s leading expert on the bin Ladens worries he might cast a vote.

Osama bin Laden has already become part of the race for the White House.
If anyone needed a reminder that the world’s most notorious terrorist is still at large, they got one in mid-May when a new audio tape from bin Laden surfaced commenting on the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel.

The presidential candidates have been busy invoking his name. Campaigning at a gun factory in Rochester, N.H., Sen. John McCain declared, “I will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and I will shoot him with your products.”

Sen. Barack Obama chided McCain on the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq back in March, saying that “we have a security gap when candidates say they will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, but refuse to follow him where he actually goes.”

During the Democratic primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton even went so far as to borrow bin Laden’s image for a campaign commercial questioning Obama’s experience.
So how worried should we be about bin Laden?

Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter and author of the new book, The Bin Ladens, insists that the hunt for bin Laden should continue. “How closely Osama himself is involved in operations nobody knows,” says Coll. “But his organization, which he leads, is still carrying out significant violence.”
Watch an interview with Steve Coll, in which he discusses both the possibility of an “October surprise” from the infamous bin Laden and what will happen when he finally disappears.Bin Laden, he notes, “still is on the airwaves, and he is narrating the global war that he imagines al Qaeda is engaged in. And by doing so he names targets, he offers rationales, he stimulates followers. He still matters in that respect.”
Meanwhile, speculation has raged in the political blogosphere over who bin Laden would be happiest to have in the White House come January 2009.

Coll, who is president of the New America Foundation, argues that bin Laden himself probably isn’t making those sorts of fine distinctions. “I’m not sure he has the sophistication to see, for instance, that McCain would be better for him—and for his branding—than Obama might be.”

However, says Coll, “I think some of the people around him might think that way.”
And that raises the possibility of an “October surprise:” a potential terrorist attack in America or against American interests abroad that is designed to influence the outcome of the election.

In 2004, bin Laden released a tape a few days before the presidential election that many—including Sen. John Kerry—suggested helped propel Bush over the top to re-election. Coll doubts that the release was designed as an attempt to aid Bush, but says that the very debate about whether it was might prompt al Qaeda to do something in 2008.

While al Qaeda probably doesn’t currently have the ability to strike on American soil, “they watch the calendar, and they create media spectaculars even where they cannot create terrorist spectaculars,” says Coll. “So I would expect bin Laden to be heard from in October or early November, one way or another.”
“He doesn’t like to sit out big events like an American election.”