Black Hawk Up: Obama after the bin Laden Elimination

This week, Obama is enjoying the luck several of his predecessors did not have. Now, the question is whether his predictable skyrocketing in polls will be maintained until the elections.

In September 1961, Elie Abel, a journalist for The Detroit News, arrived for a meeting with President John Kennedy. He was focused on his purpose: to receive Kennedy’s blessing and his cooperation in writing a book about the first term of his administration, less than a year after Kennedy had entered office.

Those were tense days, from Kennedy’s perspective, as described in a fascinating book by Frederick Kempe, titled “Berlin 1961,” on sale next week. Two weeks before a meeting with Abel, President Kennedy watched, helplessly, as the Berlin Wall was raised under the direction of leaders from East Germany and the Soviet Union — another affront he received from Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded in reading Kennedy’s powerlessness against communist brutality.

A few months earlier, Khrushchev humiliated Kennedy at a summit in Vienna — one of the most embarrassing diplomatic humiliations in the annals of the American presidency. And, of course, at the very beginning of the term, there was the horrible fiasco of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Kennedy looked directly at Abel and asked him, “Why would anyone want to write a book about an administration with nothing to show for it, except a chain of disasters?”*

End of story: The Kennedy administration, as long as it existed, did justify more than a book or two. Its moment of truth, the watershed moment of the short term that ended tragically, was faced by the president in the Cuban Missile Crisis — the predicament in which Khrushchev had gone too far, when Kennedy demonstrated that, despite suffering from back pain and swelling from medication, he had a spine.

And this is interesting: In that meeting with Abel, the president revealed, with surprising candor, that he understood well that which the public really did not understand. The polls were favorable to him, even after the Bay of Pigs, even after Vienna and even after Berlin, but the president knew his first year could not be recorded as successful.

More Luck Than Sense

It would be interesting to know whether Obama understands, as clearly, that the first two years were not a hit; if he realizes that, from having great promise, he has become a president who, as yet, has been unable to define himself. Nevertheless, this week has been a milestone week in his presidency, a week that cannot be underestimated. As Jimmy Kimmel put it on television, “I would like us to kill bin Laden every Sunday night. It makes for a much brighter start to the week.”

True, Obama was not the commander of the force. True, he did not risk his life. True, it is difficult to imagine a president who would have made a different decision. But here it is: Presidents score points for luck, too — luck, embodied in intelligence, that was placed on his desk and not on his predecessor’s. He had operational luck that some of his predecessors lacked, and this is the example everyone recalled this week: the luck Jimmy Carter lacked in the hostage rescue operation in Iran.

But it seems like the even greater deficiency of luck was that of Bill Clinton, in the incident known as “Black Hawk Down.” In Obama’s situation, it’s the same Black Hawk helicopters, the same special force fighters — this time, from the American commando SEAL Team Six — the same mission in a populated area in a hostile environment, the same chase after a wanted terrorist — this time, Osama bin Laden, and back then the Somali rebel leader, Mohamed Farrah Aidid. Incidentally, Aidid’s forces received assistance from al-Qaida.

It’s only the luck that is not the same. For Obama, there was one lost helicopter, but all the Navy SEALs got back safely after completing their mission. For Clinton in Mogadishu of 1993, when it was over, 18 United States troops had been killed, and hundreds of Somalis were dead. Aidid was not injured. He was killed only three years later. Clinton was definitely hurt. It was an important moment in his presidency, a moment that turned him into a coward for quite a long time.

The failure in Somalia was probably a main reason for why the United States avoided involvement, two years later, in preventing the slaughter in Rwanda — turning a blind eye, as carefully chronicled by Obama’s close advisor, Samantha Power, in her book, “A Problem from Hell.” It is also one of the reasons for the prolonged delay in making a decision on intervention in the wars in Yugoslavia.

Obama has already intervened — in Libya, in the reinforcement of the troops in Afghanistan and now in the elimination. He is already famous for his ruthlessness, for his cool demeanor. Sometimes, as it turns out, that has its benefits.

A Long-Range Jump

It is difficult to know the political benefits he will derive from this event, which has certainly strengthened his image in foreign and security matters and deleted agenda questions about his ability to oversee dangerous operations. The elections are still far away, and they will probably focus on the issue of the recovery of the American economy. Bin Laden will be a distant memory unless his successors manage terrorist attacks against the U.S. that would divert the agenda from its path.

Either way, Obama has enjoyed a predictable, several-point jump in polls. Pew measured nine percent; other surveys (CNN, Newsweek) have measured a more modest change. At any rate, even in the best-case scenario (for Obama), we’re not talking a dramatic change. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush’s popularity jumped by 35 percent. By the way, he gained 15 percentage points on the day Saddam Hussein was apprehended. When the first Gulf War broke out, the popularity of George H.W. Bush jumped by 23 percent. Kennedy rose only 12 percent after the Cuban missile crisis.

In any case, the question is not how high the skyrocketing is but how long it will last. One hundred and five weeks, in the case of George W. Bush and the al-Qaida terrorist attacks, were enough for him to win the 2004 election. In the case of George H.W. Bush, forty-one weeks were not enough to take the president to the finish line of the 1992 elections. Clinton, with the essential help of a third candidate, Ross Perot, succeeded in beating him. Franklin Roosevelt, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, gained only 11 percent, but the gain lasted 46 weeks. Almost a year. On the other hand, capturing Saddam Hussein, which gave Bush a boost, didn’t have long-term influence. Barely seven weeks.

According to the calculations of the “Public Opinion Strategies,” the average for the after-crisis jump is a 13 percent rise in support that lasts 22 weeks, an average that hardly could bring Obama to the primaries of the next electoral campaign, almost a year before the elections themselves.

*Editor’s Note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.