The White House isn’t counting on a bounce upward in new polls following this week’s events in Libya, and certainly not a six-point bounce like the one the president enjoyed in May after U.S. Special Forces and the CIA located and killed bin Laden. But the president’s political advisers suggest Obama can still get some reputational credit from voters for the exits of bin Laden and Gaddafi -- by becoming The Closer.
“It helps lock in and solidify the idea that he’s the guy who keeps us safe,” an unnamed senior administration official told The New York Times on Monday. “Reagan targeted Gaddafi; George W. Bush targeted bin Laden; Obama has done both.”
The closer? That could be a tough angle. If President Obama lays claim to solving foreign policy problems left to him by prior presidents, it will be difficult to avoid responsibility for failing to solve economic problems left to him by prior president(s), no? Won't people wonder why the president can get Khaddafi and bin Laden but they can't get a job?
On Libya, I did give the president credit for sticking with the intervention after the initial assumptions failed. It helped that we faced an incredibly weak regime with few assets. But we won. Should the president get election credit then, in 2012?
Well, when one leads from behind, it is very difficult to jump to the head of the parade to claim credit. Yes, our role was key in keeping the British- and French-led intervention on track. But we did not lead. How can the president claim more than a modest amount of credit for the overthrow of Khaddafi? He can get his name on the team trophy, but there will be no Most Valuable Player award.
Then there is the problem of timing for even clear success. In the summer of 2003, leading Democrats complained that the Iraq victory was well timed as a "mission accomplished" for President Bush's 2004 reelection campaign. And shall we bring up Desert Storm and President H. W. Bush's 1992 reelecton?
For Libya, there is just enough time for things to get ugly (before they can get better) when Americans vote. The President should be careful about getting the credit he seems to want so desperately right now.
The success of nailing bin Laden was a genuine success that the president can claim credit for. It was risky. President Obama took the gamble. It worked. President Obama gets credit. As he should. But the "I killed bin Laden" bounce lasted only a couple months. Bin Laden was killed in May 2011. The election is November 2012. I know I promised there would be no math here, but that is way too long of a time gap for credit to matter much if other problems dominate the lives of voters.
Hence the persistent idea in American politics that a candidate for president will befit from or engineer an "October surprise" that will provide the tail wind to sail across the electoral college threshold in November. Needless to say, other than Iraq which Vice President Biden said could be President Obama's biggest success, the timing of the overthrow of Khaddafi and the killing of bin Laden is inconvenient.
Of course, the timing thing can be finessed. The president's Hollywood allies will release a timely reminder in fall 2012 of the killing of Osama bin Laden with appropriate credit displayed of the president's gutsy call. Unless I totally misread the leanings of Hollywood, that will be the script.
We shall see if the political side of this can be spun as much as the president will need. Hollywood tried to target Bush before 2004 and the movies were so heavy-handed in propaganda that only the true believers suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome loved the movies. They weren't voting for Bush anyway, so the movies were big fails.
Can Hollywood learn a lesson from their failure and turn out an October surprise movie that actually works? Can the president get credit from behind Hollywood's effort to put him in the lead?
UPDATE: Oh, I should add another advantage to the president on this question. There will be no Lancet or Ivy League studies purporting to show the massive body count of our intervention. Yes, our tepid aerial intervention killed few Libyans from the air (and no American or NATO personnel losses at all--which is great, I might add), but when fighting drags on because we didn't go for the kill, casualties naturally go up. Estimates from April count 10,000 to 30,000 Libyans dead for just a few months of civil war and intervention. As I pointed out early on, if your sole concern is loss of life, staying out of the fight and letting Khaddafi quickly put down the revolt would have been the best course.
For a small country even 10,000 over a few months is a lot. What the toll will be when this is all over is anybody's guess, but the relative toll will be pretty harsh compared to the fewer than 100,000 who died in Iraq in 6 years of heavy fighting in a much larger population. But the anti-war left won't condemn President Obama for the toll. Being the anti-Bush has advantages with that crowd.
