Bin Laden in the US Election Campaign: GM Is Alive, Osama Is Dead

Obama currently has the highest popularity levels that he’s had in a while.

Orchestration and symbolism are two of Barack Obama’s specialties: His bid for the Democratic presidential candidacy has, like Abraham Lincoln, brought him to the steps of the Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. He marched to Selma, Alabama with black civil rights activists and now the president will make an appearance in the extremely mysterious White House Situation Room to chat in a televised interview about the details of the U.S. operation that shot down bin Laden a year ago.

Just a few days after bin Laden was shot in Abbottabad, one would expect the president’s PR strategists to have started planning how they could exploit this triumph in the critical phase of the president’s election campaign. In a new “precision operation” (in the words of the American political news source Politico), the head of al-Qaida is now being politically buried at sea for the second time. The message thereby being: Obama, who has been decried as a sissy, can present himself as the president who dispatched the greatest enemy of the U.S. At the same time, his opponent Mitt Romney must justify why he supported ending the expensive hunt for bin Laden — to be on the safe side, Obama’s people have had a video made so that that won’t be forgotten.

“General Motors is alive, bin Laden is dead.” That’s how Vice President Joe Biden recently assessed Obama’s first term; at the same time, he described the campaign strategy for the coming months. Interestingly enough, these are the two areas in which the Republicans are allowed authority: national security and the economy. In both areas, Romney has made himself look bad. Just as he wanted to let bin Laden live, he also sang the death song for the biggest American auto corporation. Neither candidate is stepping one slender foot in public, so the Republicans will have to cook up something to get out of this situation unscathed. The polls are still showing the candidates approximately dead even. But Obama’s on a tear: He is currently seeing his highest popularity values in a while — only after Osama bin Laden’s death was he as popular as he is today.