Obama: Will his bin Laden ‘bump’ last?

“The job of those working to stop Barack Obama’s re-election just got a lot harder,” said Jonathan Tobin in CommentaryMagazine.com. During his 2008 campaign, Obama pledged to do what George W. Bush had failed to accomplish—to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. Making good on that promise “adds to his stature as leader in a way that few other events could have done.” Two days after Obama’s announcement that bin Laden was dead triggered celebrations and relief across the nation, polls found that the president’s approval rating had jumped about 10 points, to 57 percent. The spike in Obama’s poll numbers is bound to subside, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com, but “in my view, the president who found and killed Osama bin Laden will be very hard not to re-elect.” The “Big Lie” that Obama is a weak, dithering Muslim sympathizer was emphatically debunked in that hail of bullets in Abbottabad.

It certainly will “be hard to run against Obama…for the next few weeks,” said Jonathan Bernstein in WashingtonPost.com. But the election won’t happen for 19 months. In the past, these “rally-round-the-flag effects” have been very short-lived. President George H.W. Bush, for example, had an 89 percent approval rating after launching the first Gulf War in 1991, yet he lost to Bill Clinton just a year later. The news this week is all about bin Laden, said Jonathan Chait in NewRepublic.com. For most of the remaining 80 weeks between now and the next presidential election, the news will once again be about unemployment, rising gas prices, and the perilous state of the U.S. economy. Come Election Day 2012, the impact of bin Laden’s death will be “minimal to nonexistent.”

For some other president, that might be true, said William Dobson, also in NewRepublic.com, but not for this particular president. Obama, up to now, showed no foreign-policy toughness, and Democrats have had a long series of bungled commando operations—Jimmy Carter’s failed hostage-rescue mission in Iran, Bill Clinton’s “Black Hawk Down.” And yet Obama turned down the safe chance to bomb bin Laden from 30,000 feet, ordering a high-risk, nighttime commando raid that killed the most notorious terrorist leader in history, whisked his corpse away, and confirmed his identity. The Republicans’ attempt to caricature Obama as another Jimmy Carter is now over. Obama didn’t just help his own image, said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast​.com. With this one gutsy decision, he may have freed the whole Democratic Party from the wimpy reputation “that Republicans have labored decades to build.”

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That’s utter nonsense, said Andrew McCarthy in NationalReview​.com. Obama made the right decision here, and he deserves his “bin Laden bump” in the polls. But U.S. voters aren’t about to forget his dithering over Afghanistan and Libya, or the flip-flop over closing Guantánamo Bay, or any of the dozen other occasions where he chose vacillation and compromise over decisive leadership. I agree that killing bin Laden isn’t enough to win Obama re-election, said Steve Benen in WashingtonMonthly.com. I also agree that a lot can happen between now and November 2012. But Obama’s putting together a long list of accomplishments with which to sell himself to the voters: ending the Great Recession, reforming the health-care system, reforming Wall Street, repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,”…and, oh yes: “He killed Osama bin Laden, too. Is that a winning message? I’ve heard worse.”