President and Commander: About Terror Threats and Political Profit

Four days before critical midterm elections in the United States, Obama is going to make optimal use of the foiled plane explosion affair in order to gain political points.

The White House has responded within the last days with extraordinary speed; electrifying speed. In Washington, they made sure that President Obama was the one to announce to the American nation, and to the world, that what was defined at first a “false alarm,” and then, a “dry exercise,” was actually a well-organized terror operation.

The media-political strategy of the administration was designed to clarify that, contrary to other presidents, such as George Bush for example, the current president is focused on all the details and does not downplay any threat. The White House has published the precise schedule Obama followed — starting Thursday at 10:35 p.m. Washington time — when he received the first report from his counterterrorism adviser John Brennan. Obama’s instructions to escort civilian cargo planes by fighter jets, the national coordination of the intelligence agencies and being scrupulous to assume that this is a tangible threat — all of these were designated to create integrity of circumstances that would illustrate the gap between Obama’s policy and Bush’s performance before 9/11.

The United States and Britain were eager to emphasize, again and again, that thanks to the cooperation with Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the terror attacks were prevented, apparently. One more hint to voters: There is a return for the Obama administration’s policy of dialogue with the Muslim world.

Affair That Is to Cause Damage to the Democrats

Obama has already erred in such matters in the past. When it became clear in December 2009 that a terrorist tried to blow up an American plane on its way to Michigan, the American President was on a private vacation in Hawaii. The statements he released to the press weren’t immediate, and his critics hurried to claim that he was “soft on terrorism.” Four days before the critical midterm elections in the United States, Obama was not going to repeat the same mistake. If there were political points to be gained from this story, the president did not intend to give them as a gift to the Republicans.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked explicitly yesterday whether there is a connection between the publicity of the Yemen terror threat and the election campaign, and his answer was very predictable: No, there is no intention to provoke a national panic concerning a possible attack; and yes, the details of the investigation were publicized only after being approved by the appropriate bodies. Both Gibbs and the person who posed the question recognized very well what was in the background of such a loaded question: the political assumption that the administration in power enjoys popularity in the days of national security threat.

The natural interpretation will rule that a terror threat is felicitous for a president in office because he exudes the image of a political leader and dons the character of Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces. Many commentators claim that, in 2004, John Kerry lost the election campaign because of the exposure of Osama bin Laden’s threatening videotapes. Bush also tried to make use of the alerts in the midterm elections of 2006. (It didn’t work; the Republicans lost.)

And nevertheless, it may be that bringing the terror issue to the agenda is likely to cause harm to the Democrats. The first reason is, of course, that Obama is a Democratic president and obviously suspected by Republican voters and some independents to have a conciliatory policy toward Muslims. The second reason is tied to the list of American priorities, which are not so focused these days on terror threats but on threats to livelihood and the threat of unemployment.

The author is the foreign news editor of Channel 10.