How will Bhutto’s assassination affect the presidential race?

December 27, 2007

I got my first email that Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto had been killed at 8:47 a.m. this morning. I started hearing about “what this means” for the U.S. presidential race by about 8:56 a.m. (By 9:30 a.m., Joe Scarborough apparently was telling MSNBC viewers that this is good news for Rudy Giuliani.) It’s just that kind of news cycle, I suppose.

Given that details of the events in Rawalpindi are still emerging, it’s obviously far too soon to know what effect, if any, this might have on the Dems’ and Republicans’ nominating process. Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to think most Americans probably don’t know who Benazir Bhutto is, and her assassination will not necessarily influence their presidential preferences.

But for those who are engaged in current events, the speculation is already well underway.

Bloody images of Pakistan in turmoil, which will dominate newspapers and TV news just as Iowa voters are making their final decision and the caucuses are only a week away , will remind voters that this is a dangerous world.

And the aftermath — still very unclear in the chaos surrounding Bhutto’s death — will test the agility of the presidential campaigns in dealing with an unexpected and momentous event; a dry run for daily life at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

I suppose it’s fairly easy to guess what the various message maestros are going to tell us.

Bhutto’s assassination is bound to help Hillary Clinton, because she has experience on the national stage.

No, say John McCain backers, this is bound to help him because he has military experience.

No, say Barack Obama backers, this is bound to help him because in a time of crisis, we clearly need someone with good judgment.

No, say Rudy Giuliani backers, this is bound to help him because he was the mayor of a city attacked by terrorists.

No, say Mitt Romney backers, this is bound to help him because it hurts Mike Huckabee, whose understanding of foreign affairs rivals that of small children.

No, say Joe Biden backers, this is bound to help him because he has more foreign policy experience than most of the candidates in both parties put together.

My hunch is no one has the foggiest idea which candidate Bhutto’s death helps, if any, but that won’t deter the breathless speculation.

Please, it helps Bill Richardson…

Anybody who thinks this helps Rudy hasn’t really studied Rudy’s record too well.

But as I wrote in the ARG Poll thread, the sickening posturing of the Iowan caucus goers, trying to decide on a candidate they can foist on America, probably means they will move to Rudy and Hillary.

Thus pundits I.

  • Remember that the reason that Bhutto was overthrown is that she was corrupt. The reason that Sharif was overthrown is that he wanted Musharraf’s plane to crash as he closed the airports and wouldn’t allow his plane to land. Musharraf instigated the coup while he was in the air.

    Pakistan is a corrupt place and it is almost impossible to figure out what is going on there.

    Pakistan has a nuclear bomb(s) and Pakistan is a big supporter of the Taliban. Bin Laden is probably living in Pakistan.

    The whole situation would be funny if it weren’t so scary. (I don’t mean to make light of such a serious situation with so many people getting killed on a regular basis.) I wish there were a solution but I fear that things will only get worse.

  • Islamic country, dangerously unstable politically, socially and religiously, armed with nuclear weapons, with a military that operates above the law and an intelligence service that arms and supports our enemies. What’s not to love about Pakistan? More problems there than all the other wars involved.

    Other than Israel, where the “peace loving” Prime Minister has once again this morning refused to remove the Jewish Taliban from the West Bank. This of course doesn’t get the coverage today it would have, given the events in Pakistan.

    1,000 years of backwardness and competition to be the most religiously-extreme by all parties – Christian, Muslim, Jewish – in the Middle East are coming to a head, and not the way the fundie scum on all sides want.

    Christian, Jew, Muslim – all nouns that describe great traditions. Put “fundamentalist” in front of each and they become adjectives describing the shade of brown. But it’s then the same shit.

  • I would be surprised if Rudy could talk about Pakistan with much understanding – which places him at the level of most of the voters – so perhaps the expected invocation of 9/11 and terror and danger and chaos will work well for him with that segment of the population that is still vulnerable to those images.

    Huckabee probably has a religious explanation.

  • Bhutto’s death is a tragedy. She was a very brave and courageous woman. I guess there is a way for Hillary to spin this to her advantage, but this is a twist of events that might not benefit her because Bhutto is a woman. Political leaders lives are at risk when they run their countries. JFK was assassinated. An attempt was made on Regan’s life. This stuff happens. While this country is ready for a woman president, I don’t think it is ready for the potential that a woman may die by violence in office. I hope this never happens here, but Bhutto was (as leaders go) a relatively young, beautiful woman and it happened to her.

  • Amen, Mary C. – what a horrible turn of events – she watched her father’s execution by Musharaff’s old boss Zia – and now she was executed, who knows possibly by Musharaff himself…

    Scarborough et al are a testament to the ignorance pervasive in this country – I hope the next preseident will promote a culture of awareness.

  • The horse race has become such an obsession that all events gets filtered through it.

    I heard Bhutto speak at Agnes Scott in Atlanta. She was an amazing woman. Her death is a very sad part of the brutal reality of the region.

  • Bhutto had to know this was possible, perhaps even likely. Yes, she was convicted of corruption; she was also subsequently re-elected by a public that was aware of that conviction. She was a bright, moderate, strong force in a country that badly needs all three. Most important, she was a legitimate counter-force to Musharraf had her party taken control of the legislature. This is a sad day on an international level; I do not think it helps any domestic campaign, but it does hurt them all by making the world one of them will be dealing with that much more difficult and unstable.

  • CB: “Scarborough apparently was telling MSNBC viewers that this is good news for Rudy Giuliani.) It’s just that kind of news cycle, I suppose.”

    this is the problem with playing telephone with the news. i was watching msnbc when that interview happened. mica something (the msnbc news person) got scarborough on the phone and asked him what he thought it meant politically here at home. he first brought up guiliani’s immediately issued press release (not surprisingly playing the terror card: “Her death is a reminder that terrorism anywhere — whether in New York, London, Tel-Aviv or Rawalpindi — is an enemy of freedom. We must redouble our efforts to win the Terrorists’ War on Us.”) and then scarborough went on to answer the question by saying it would probably benefit guiliani and clinton the most. i have no recollection of him saying anything about this being “good news”.

    as much as i like good blogs like this one a bit of due diligence is in order.

  • #11 – entheo

    saying “it would probably benefit guiliani” is the same thing – I don’t see the difference.

    But I agree. Bringing the dipshit Scarborough on the telephone after an important world event was indeed MSNBC’s first mistake.

  • This is bound to help Ann Coulter, who can now share her witticism about how she wished it had been Hillary Clinton who had been shot & bombed. (Witticism conceived at 8:49 a.m.)

  • Neil Wilson wrote:

    Remember that the reason that Bhutto was overthrown is that she was corrupt.

    I’d like to see a hell of a lot of self-respecting people try to make it around countries like Angola or Zimbabwe to accomplish a range of kinds of tasks without paying out bribes– not to mention actually trying to govern there. There are some places where the situation is so bad that you can’t accomplish things without playing some part in the game of the corrupt. You can’t survive by trying to reject it totally. America pays bribes, for sure. How would we get people with valuable intelligence information to defect to our side if it wasn’t often the product of a bribe? In other places, I’m sure you can and should accomplish things by rejecting corruption totally.

    I’m not sure what the situation was with Bhutto’s so-called corruption and how much she was to blame for it if it existed, but you haven’t provided a single detail so all I can say is what I wrote above.

    My impression is that Musharraf is more of a usurping authoritarian, and Bhutto tended more to be on the side of democracy, human rights and freedom.

  • Normally, as would most people, I would say that ‘She was corrupt’ is a good enough condemnation to level at somebody. But I think there are some particular situations where you have to ask more before you say that is good enough. If somebody asked me if Jimmy Hoffa was a bad man, I would want to consider whether or not there was someone else at the time who could have accomplished all the good he did accomplish. Did his mob connections just enrich him? Or was he doing what he had to do just to win a fight for oppressed people?

    You could call Joan of Arc or Robin Hood or someone a sell-out all you want for not fighting every rotten aspect of the medieval system, but in the eyes of sensible people, they’re no less heroes for doing the one or two things they did do- instead of trying to single-handedly establish representative constitutional democracies in their areas.

  • Pingback: The Heretik : Death Becomes Him, Or Him, Or Her

  • Dan: “The big presidential question is whether Mike Huckabee knows it happened yet.”

    LOL

    Well, just a smile. Somehow I think his staff had better be on top of this one.

    Swan: “You could call Joan of Arc or Robin Hood or someone a sell-out all you want for not fighting every rotten aspect of the medieval system, but in the eyes of sensible people, they’re no less heroes for doing the one or two things they did do- instead of trying to single-handedly establish representative constitutional democracies in their areas.”

    No you couldn’t! Neither Jeanne d’Arc nor Robin of Locksley would even have imagined a representative constitutional democracy as a “good thing”. They were products of their times and educations. As far as Jeanne was concerned, getting the English out of France was quite enough. As for Robin, just having the laws of England justly applied would have made him happy.

    This is like critizing Napoleon for not establishing a liberal democracy at a time when the most democratic country in the world had institutionalized slavery written into its constitution.

  • Scarborough and the MSM in particular are very quick to jump to the conclusion that it was terrorists that assassinated Bhutto. No person could possibly be a leader in Pakistan without being corrupt to a certain extent and the Pakistan people know this.
    That said, how do the ‘terrorists’ stand to benefit from her death more so than Musharraf. He gains in that it eliminates his opposition from the election plus gives him cause to declare Marshall Law and/or round up and eliminate any terrorists groups like the Taliban.

    Musharraf is Bush’s man so it seems our MSM’s job is to divert any blame from Bush’s man for involvement in this tragedy.

    In Guliani’s world they are all guilty if they believe in Islam and only by accepting our way of life will they ever be ‘saved’ from themselves. Rudy is always screaming that the sky is falling. The democratic candidates will all be pretty much in accord in their response to this event. It will be the republicans who will use it to spread fear and panic and try to use that to act like they are some great protector when in reality the terrorists attacks in this country happened on their watch and they have made us less safe with their disaster in Iraq.
    Guiliani would declare Pakistan safe to tourists right now just like the air at ground zero was safe to breathe. As usual he would have his head up the ass of some camera and charging by the hour.

  • This helps Ron Paul but not really because I don’t think he’ll be elected and he won’t run independently because he knows it would siphon the vote from the leading Republican and he wouldn’t win as an independent anyway. He’s smart enough to avoid doing that because it would hand the presidency to a democrat.

    His whole campaign is about avoiding aliances and signing into agreements that will hurt us in the future. Now that we have this “alliance” with a corrupt and chaotic Pakistan that is allegedly the safehold of Osama bin Laden, we’ve gotten ourself into a mess. Both Bhutto and Musharaff are corrupt. Also, Giuliani knows more than you think about fundamentalist Islam. In the immediate aftermath of the 1993 WTC Bombing, the FBI, CIA, and other anti-terrorist groups redoubled their efforts and a lot of communication went between those groups and the mayor’s office. So give him some credit. Also, he worked in the Justice Dept. during Reagan’s administration. Admitted, it’s not the state Dept. but it is still close to the President, and Reagan was good on foreign policy.

    Mike Huckabee at least as much or plenty more than every person who has posted on here criticizing his knowledge of foreign policy, so avoid doing that.

  • South Carolinian said: “Mike Huckabee [knows] at least as much or plenty more than every person who has posted on here criticizing his knowledge of foreign policy, so avoid doing that.”

    Oh, please! There is no reason I should suppose Mike Huckabee knows more about foreign policy than I do. He certainly has not demonstrated any such knowledge.

    But then, neither has Boy George II.

    • Comments are closed.