Politics and the Pakistan Effect

For weeks Hillary Clinton's aides have looked at the landscape through a simple prism: the more dangerous the world looks, the more voters will be drawn to a "safe" candidate like the former first lady. That seemed like an easy and comforting explanation for Barack Obama's rise in the polls—that voters were tempted to "roll the dice" (in Bill Clinton's phrase) only at a relatively stable time when domestic issues started to seem more pressing than foreign affairs.

Campaign calculations tend to be crude, but that doesn't stop political operatives from making them. So does the assassination of Benazir Bhutto push foreign affairs—and an unstable world—back to the top of voters' minds just a week before the Iowa caucuses? And if so, who benefits?

In public, all the candidates issued comments condemning Bhutto's killers and praising the former Pakistani prime minister's commitment to democracy. Clinton added a personal touch, telling how she had met Bhutto in and out of office. "I came to know Mrs. Bhutto over many years, during her tenures as prime minister and during her years in exile," she said in a written statement. Sen. John McCain, campaigning in New Hampshire, discussed Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf and the stability of the region in nuanced terms that showcased his foreign-policy expertise; Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also got a chance to demonstrate his geopolitical chops.

Obama, for his part, stuck to a boilerplate expression of support for the Pakistani people and democracy, as well as opposition to terrorism. At his second stop of the day he apologized for being late, saying he had been consulting with intelligence and State Department officials about the current situation in Pakistan, which he described as "still a little dicey." He later pointed out that he had long identified Pakistan as a core problem demanding a new approach, saying the Iraq war had distracted the United States from the real fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Most of the Republicans stampeded to judgment. Mitt Romney condemned the assassination as proof of the "extraordinary reality of global violent radical jihadism"—ignoring the most likely analysis that this was a Pakistani attack, not an international one. (Bhutto's own supporters turned their anger toward President Musharraf, not Al Qaeda.)

For Rudy Giuliani, who just released a new 9/11-themed commercial in New Hampshire and Florida titled "Freedom," the assassination was only one step away from Manhattan. "Her death is a reminder that terrorism anywhere—whether in New York, London, Tel Aviv or Rawalpindi—is an enemy of freedom," he said in a statement. "We must redouble our efforts to win the terrorists' war on us."