|
May 2, 2011
What Obama Put on the Line to Get bin Laden
GOP candidates' reactions separate the pretenders from the contenders.
By Jill Lawrence
At least four plausible Republican presidential prospects have congratulated President Obama on the capturing and killing of Osama bin Laden, which suggests they understand the office they are seeking. To those who couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge the role this president played in bringing about this long-awaited moment, the correct question might be, what were they thinking?
As more details emerge, it is increasingly clear exactly how Obama influenced the course of events – from telling CIA chief Leon Panetta to make bin Laden a top priority, to presiding over five National Security Council meetings this spring, to vetoing an air strike and ordering the more dangerous mission of special forces making a helicopter landing and confronting bin Laden directly.
Consider that choice. An air strike that would have kept U.S. forces safe while killing civilians and bin Laden, assuming we could ever be absolutely positive that he was in the compound and we had in fact killed him, or a far more risky helicopter landing that put U.S. forces in danger. There was circumstantial evidence of bin Laden’s presence at the compound, but there was no confirmation. So Obama might have approved a raid that killed innocents and come up empty.
The upshot – zero U.S. casualties, DNA and photographic evidence of bin Laden’s death, a potential trove of information about al Qaeda, limited collateral damage – was hardly pre-ordained. Who could forget that Jimmy Carter’s secret mission to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran ended with crashed helicopters in the desert? Or that bin Laden slipped out of the grasp of U.S. forces at Tora Bora in 2001?
White House counter-terrorism chief John Brennan called Obama’s move “one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory.” The four GOP contenders who rose above politics to offer apparently sincere congratulations to Obama, who seemed most able to picture themselves sitting in that Oval Office, making a decision that tough, are former House speaker Newt Gingrich, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who resigned Saturday as Obama’s envoy to China to explore a race against him. The rest – Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Gary Johnson, Herman Cain, Mike Huckabee, Buddy Roemer — were either grudging or didn’t mention Obama at all.
Donald Trump, who is in a category by himself, congratulated Obama for “a job well done” in a statement to ABC News. A surrender? An indirect call for a ceasefire? Seems like it, given the timing, two days after Obama ridiculed Trump for his superficial celebrity life and his incessant hectoring about Obama’s birthplace. The jokes at Trump’s expense came at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday night, right between Obama’s order Friday to go ahead with the mission and its execution Sunday morning (it would have happened Saturday if not for a weather-related delay – that might have made for an interesting correspondents dinner).
Many have noted the incongruity of Obama having to put up with Trump, his “birther” fixation and the media’s inability to ignore his antics. Perhaps the height of the strangeness is realizing now that Obama (who released his official birth certificate years ago) took the official steps needed to obtain his long-form birth certificate from the state of Hawaii, and personally presented it to the media, during the same spring period that he was presiding over five national security meetings on the bin Laden mission. Or maybe the height is that at the correspondents dinner – appearing to have not a care in the world – Obama jabbed Trump for his decisiveness in firing Gary Busey for sub-par steak cooking on NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” “These are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir,” Obama said, knowing full well that the nation would soon know what really keeps him up at night.
Obama goes into the post-bin Laden era with a 46 percent approval rating in the Gallup poll, and 45 percent disapproval. Pollsters are predicting a surge in the coming days and weeks, though they don’t know how long it will last. George H.W. Bush’s soaring approval rating of 80 percent in February 1991, as the brief, successful Gulf War was ending, certainly didn’t endure long enough to help him win the 1992 election. Nor did Bush’s son sustain his jump to 86 percent in the days after the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and ignited the long hunt for bin Laden. He was at 48 percent when he narrowly beat John Kerry in 2004.
The more significant trend may be whether more Americans start seeing Obama as a “strong and decisive leader.” On that measure, he has fallen from 73 percent in April 2009 to 52 percent in March. Americans, egged on by Republicans who have called Obama weak, naïve, passive and (Gingrich’s phrase) a “spectator-in-chief,” don’t quite know what to make of Obama’s leadership style. Much of it happens behind the scenes and is devoted to achieving things he said years ago that he’d do – for instance, use U.S. forces to go after bin Laden in Pakistan with or without the Pakistanis.
Obama had been working toward Sunday’s raid since September, when he was presented with intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts and started working with the CIA on a set of options. The deliberations were well along by February, when a procession of Republican White House prospects railed at Obama’s alleged weakness and naivete on the world stage before fired-up crowds at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
The killing of bin Laden will quiet that line of attack for now. But one wonders how often Obama must produce a stunning, showy victory to keep it quiet, and whether some of his praise-withholding potential rivals are being partisan, or simply don’t get what he put on the line.
| 
