Obama Finds Praise, Even From Republicans
By JEFF ZELENY and JIM RUTENBERG
WASHINGTON — President Obama drew praise from unlikely quarters on Monday for pursuing a risky and clandestine mission to kill Osama bin Laden, a successful operation that interrupted the withering Republican criticism about his foreign policy, world view and his grasp of the office.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney declared, “The administration clearly deserves credit for the success of the operation.” New York’s former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said, “I admire the courage of the president.” And Donald J. Trump declared, “I want to personally congratulate President Obama.”
As fleeting as it might prove to be, the positive tone stood in blunt contrast to the narrative Republicans have been working to build in the opening stages of the 2012 presidential campaign.
The argument that most potential Republican candidates have been making — that Mr. Obama is an indecisive leader, incapable of handling rapidly evolving events around the world — suddenly became more complicated. And the boost in stature for Mr. Obama, even if temporary, comes when a number of Republicans are deciding whether to commit themselves to the presidential race, and offered fresh evidence that he might be less vulnerable than his opponents thought.
The development came at a good time for Mr. Obama, who received the worst foreign policy rating of his presidency in a New York Times/CBS News poll last month, with 46 percent of respondents saying they disapproved of his handling of international affairs. But the implications for the president, who will visit the World Trade Center on Thursday, were impossible to predict.
The nation’s unemployment rate remains relatively high, and the economic recovery has yet to gain traction. High gasoline prices are pinching consumer budgets and eroding confidence. Seventy percent of Americans in the Times/CBS poll last month said the country was on the wrong track, and the White House is heading into what could be a bitter fight with Republicans about spending and raising the debt limit.
But at a minimum, Mr. Obama has been dealt another high-profile opportunity to try to position himself above the bitter partisan fray and offer a voice of reasoned compromise — a theme consistent with his strategy over the past six months of shedding Republican efforts to cast him as a partisan liberal out of touch with the country’s values.
“The world is safer; it is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Obama said Monday. “Today, we are reminded that, as a nation, there’s nothing we can’t do when we put our shoulders to the wheel, when we work together, when we remember the sense of unity that defines us as Americans.”
The terrorist attacks that Bin Laden masterminded in New York and Washington a decade ago caused a significant shift in the nation’s politics. It remained to be seen to what extent his killing — dramatic as it was — would reorder the political landscape.
The developments came at a big moment in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, with new prospective candidates like Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana facing pressure to jump in. Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor who just returned from two years as ambassador to China to open a presidential run, found his efforts to trumpet his foreign policy experience immediately overshadowed.
“The president deserves and will receive credit for Bin Laden being killed on his watch,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who advised Mr. Giuliani’s 2008 presidential bid. “Like Sept. 11 and its aftermath, this is a moment that transcends politics.”
Karl Rove, the Republican strategist for President George W. Bush, said that party’s crop of presidential aspirants would be wise to not be “churlish.” But he said he did not believe Bin Laden’s death would be a deciding issue in the 2012 campaign.
“This will tend to cause a lot of people to say we got our job done,” Mr. Rove said, noting a similar reaction when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003. “This is a moment that will require him to say, ‘Here’s what needs to be done to prevail in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Yemen, in the broader war on terror.’ ”
For Mr. Obama, the killing of Bin Laden represented a significant mark in his evolution as a national political leader, a career that has developed entirely in the decade since 9/11.
He was initially warned against seeking higher office because his name looked and sounded like Bin Laden’s. His campaign assertions that he would unilaterally act against “high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan were met with charges of naďveté from rivals — including Hillary Rodham Clinton — for telegraphing such a move. The president’s advisers declined to discuss the political ramifications of the Bin Laden killing. But they said that they were mindful of the lessons of 1992, when the approval ratings of President George Bush rocketed after the Gulf War.
Samuel K. Skinner, the White House chief of staff at the time, remembered how Mr. Bush emerged with approval ratings of around 90 percent only to lose to Bill Clinton the following year.
“Everybody was shocked at how quickly things had dropped, precipitously,” Mr. Skinner said in an interview Monday. “Because of economic issues — and people’s perspectives of where the economy was — we were basically down south of 50 percent by October and November, and we were never able to recover.”
More recently, the bump in the polls that George W. Bush received after the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 evaporated within months.
In his first presidential campaign, Mr. Obama reaped considerable political benefit from his anti-Iraq war candidacy. In his second, he is hoping that he reaps the same level of benefit from his established role as a commander in chief who sent more troops to Afghanistan, authorized military strikes on Libya and signed off on the mission to kill Bin Laden.
John Ullyot, a former Marine intelligence officer who served as a Republican spokesman on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the operation was “a gutsy call because so much could have gone wrong.”
“The fact that Obama approved this mission instead of the safer option of bombing the compound was the right call militarily,” Mr. Ullyot said, “but also a real roll of the dice politically because of how quickly it could have unraveled.”
