The year is still young, and the odds seem strong for one of two prevailing predictions for 2006 to come true: Dick Cheney or Osama bin Laden will be gone from power, possibly after the midterm elections.

Betting on which outcome is the likeliest, or the possibility that both come true, is beyond me. But I’ll lay a modest wager that one of them bites the dust this year.

My hope is that President Bush knew something the rest of us didn’t when he confidently predicted bin Laden’s capture last week while visiting Afghanistan — and was possibly within earshot of “the evil one,” who is believed to be hiding somewhere in that country or just over the border with Pakistan. “He will be brought to justice,” Bush said at a March 1 news conference in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. “We’ve got U.S. forces on the hunt for not only bin Laden but anybody who plots and plans with bin Laden.”

Could we be closer to finding the al Qaeda leader than is publicly known? British security experts at Aegis Defence Services suggested this in their annual terrorism report, which was released a few days before Bush’s prediction. It described the net as closing in on bin Laden and his deputies.

Of course, it is easy to be skeptical about such talk, with bin Laden still at large four years and six months after the Sept. 11 attacks he ordered. The failure to hunt down and terminate the instigator of the deadliest attack ever on U.S. soil makes you wonder how hard we are really trying.

Bush recently gave credence to the theory that he benefits from the status quo. In a new book, “Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media,” the president is quoted on the effect of bin Laden’s 2004 election-eve release of a video tape attacking him. “I thought it was going to help,” Bush told author Bill Sammon. “I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”

The facts support the president’s analysis. Tracking pollsters at Democracy Corps, a pro-Democratic Party group, found that on the Friday before Election Day 2004, when bin Laden released his tape, Democratic nominee John Kerry was ahead by 3 percentage points and rising. On Saturday the poll showed a sudden reversal of Kerry’s momentum, and an even race.

You would think that capturing or killing bin Laden would be more helpful to Republicans at the ballot box, but on the contrary, that might close the door on a chapter in our history that seems to aid the GOP. As long as bin Laden is around to frighten the voters, they might be less willing to abandon the party in power than if he were long gone, giving Americans a reason to experiment with new leadership. Also, Democrats have done little to show they would do a better job of tracking him down, and they seem unable to effectively hold Bush accountable for failing to do so.

Memo to bin Laden: Find a new cave after Nov. 7. Bush might go easy on the hunt until then, but once those elections are behind him, he will be hot to find you before his presidency is finished.

There is every chance that Bush will grow cold on his vice president after the election, if not before. Reports abound of his advisers, friends and family members, including his father, suggesting that Cheney is a liability. The president’s trademark stubbornness and loyalty could be all that stands between Cheney and retirement.

But after November, the president could be swayed by the need to name a successor to ensure that the White House stays in Republican hands after his departure. The GOP currently has no obvious successor to Bush — and no real national figure to bring to the ticket besides Sen. John McCain, whom many party loyalists fear almost as much as Hillary Rodham Clinton. (I said almost.)

So there will be pressure on Bush to give someone a leg up. The drumbeat for Cheney’s ouster in conservative circles, most recently from Insight magazine, is far from deafening, but it’s still palpable. We have heard this before. This time, however, the stakes for maintaining GOP control of Congress and the White House are higher than ever, and the vice president’s unpopularity in opinion polls portends disaster. The latest CBS poll put Cheney’s favorability rating at 18 percent.

My guess is that we will hear ever-increasing buzz about a vice-presidential opening, much of it fueled by GOP operatives eager to promote new faces and excite the grass roots for turnout in November. But if Cheney does resign, it will be after the elections so he can more easily make it appear to be on his own terms.

Either way, it is tough to imagine business as usual for both Cheney and bin Laden by year’s end.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.