The United States and its allies have moved closer to capturing Osama bin Laden in the last two months, a top U.S. counterterrorism official said in a television interview broadcast Saturday.
"If he has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking. He will be caught," Joseph Cofer Black, the U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, told private Geo television network.
An interesting question is whether a bin Laden capture is good for the president's re-election. I don't think it does.
Capturing bin Laden this close to the election will bring cries from some liberals that Bush timed it purposefully. And although the press didn't see any coincidence in Clinton's bombing of Iraq during the impeachment vote, they will keep this charge in the public mind not by endorsing it, but by asking conservatives over and over again whether voters should have reason to wonder. The conservatives will say that it's nonsense, but the purpose will be met.
While some liberals decry a setup, other liberals will rally that the war on terror is now a sham, because the only real harmful terrorist has been captured. The long national nightmare is over they will explain. Now it will be time to patch those frayed relations with the world and focus on all of those domestic problems that have been ignored in the last 4 years while Bush prosecuted an "unnecessary" war. The media will help to spread this talking point as well.
Now how much either charge would hurt Bush is debatable, but the media has a way of directing the attention where they want the attention. For instance, the Swift Boat Vets are given no credibility simply because someone who likes Bush gave them money for their ads. They don't mind giving air time to people who doubt Bush's National Guard service record, but they don't want Kerry questioned in the same way. Even if the accusers are as highly decorated as the accused.
The only way I see the capture of bin Laden helping the president is if it happens a few days before the election. The capture will leave Bush as the man of the hour, before the public has an opportunity to filter in the media's conventional wisdom. The revelation on the Friday before the 2000 election that Bush had been arrested for drunken driving didn't give Republicans enough time to counter and it helped Gore close the gap.
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