MSNBC's Joe Scarborough offered a somewhat blinkered assessment of how the assassination of Benazir Bhutto will impact the 2008 presidential race. The short version: a boon for Rudy Giuliani, a bust for Barack Obama.
Many have said if the war on terror became the forefront issue that Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton would benefit, if you will, from that issue and now we're watching this happen.
SCARBOROUGH: There's no doubt about it. In fact, Rudy Giuliani was the first to put out a statement that morning of all the candidates and it was the type of statement that every republican followed shortly thereafter. Because what Rudy Giuliani has been reminding Americans during this entire campaign is this is a dangerous world, and you've got to have a tough leader who is going to be tough on Islamic terrorists and extremists and that's been Giuliani's trump card...the surge has made Iraq a much calmer place to live so when Iowa voters and New Hampshire voters and South Carolina voters see this chaos in a country of 160 million people, where the Taliban and al Qaeda reside, who have nuclear weapons and you have a military dictatorship, it certainly plays into the hands of the candidates that voters are going to trust the most in a time of crisis, and on the Republican side most people would agree that the man of the year, Rudy Giuliani in 2001, is going to gain the most on the republican side and on the Democratic side it's just not even a close call. This is a big -- this is a big challenge for Barack Obama and most would suggest that it does help Hillary Clinton.
The Giuliani side of Scarborough's argument comes larded with any number of dubious claims (Iraq is a much calmer place post-surge because the warring factions have forced each other out of their neighborhoods) and pure superficialities: the "trump card" that Rudy holds is nothing more than his coincidental proximity to the 9/11 attacks. What Scarborough loosely defines as toughness could be more accurately described as Giuliani's willingness to embrace the sort of foreign policy that Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias accurately captured as "the kind of thinking that's animated the Bush administration at its very worst moments" and the "experts" who pimped these strategies (of whom Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall said: "Scrape the bottom of the 'Global War on Terror' Islamofascism nutbasket and you find they've pretty much all signed on as Rudy advisors.").
These failed ideas are, right now, playing themselves out in the streets of Rawalpindi, and ordinarily, I'd say it was preposterous to suggest that the electoral benefits of this tragedy should accrue to the candidate whose avowed policy plans promise more of the same. But now that this ball has been put in play, the media could very well volley it back and forth enough so that it takes on the illusion of good sense. Make no mistake, though: the outcome Scarborough predicts here would be a net loss for the United States.
As far as the Obama side of the argument goes, Scarborough says this event presents a "challenge" for the candidate that could be potentially "devastating." But Bhutto's assassination merely provides a new frame for the fight that Obama and Clinton are already having, in which Clinton touts her experience and Obama pushes back by suggesting that we need a clean break from the failed national security policies of the past.
If Clinton can claim an advantage, it could be simply that she's interacted with Bhutto personally. But if you revisit the heat Obama took for saying that "as president he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into [Pakistan] unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists," it seems that Obama can actually lay claim to a certain amount of prescience.
But beyond prescience, the Obama camp may also benefit from being able to demonstrate that their approach to foreign policy represents a divergence from the Bush administration policies that kicked the can down the road again and again in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the wake of Bhutto's death, Obama campaign spokesman David Axelrod hinted at this distinction:
"Well, it puts on the table foreign policy judgment, and that's a discussion we welcome. Barack Obama had the judgment to oppose the war in Iraq, and he warned at the time it would divert us from Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and now we see the effect of that. Al Qaeda's resurgent, they're a powerful force now in Pakistan, they may have been involved - we've been here, so I don't know whether the news has been updated, but there's a suspicion they may have been involved in this. I think his judgment was good. Senator Clinton made a different judgment, so let's have that discussion."
Axelrod is, of course, suggesting, that his candidate breaks more sharply with Bush administration policies than Clinton does. But more importantly, and contrary to Scarborough's suggestion, the Obama campaign, by striking this contrast, will be well-positioned to challenge a Republican nominee like Giuliani, who remains, like all of the GOP contenders, gravely afflicted with Bush's foreign policy myopia.