The Overseas Booby Trap

Twenty years ago this month Jimmy Carter offered asylum to anyone who wanted to leave Cuba. Fidel Castro responded by emptying his jails of lunatics and criminals and sending them to the United States on what came to be known as the Mariel boatlift. Over the hysterical objections of a young governor named Bill Clinton, Carter housed many of the criminals at Fort Chafee, Ark. The prisoners rioted, just one of several foreign-policy fiascoes to beset Carter in 1980. Both men lost that fall, at least partly because of dicey international circumstances that, once set in motion, spun out of control.

Foreign policy has not been much of an issue recently in presidential politics. Most voters could not care less about a candidate's vision of the post-cold-war world or his grasp of the nuances of diplomacy, even when the countries are as important as Russia or China. President Bush argued in 1992 that Bill Clinton's foreign-policy experience consisted of eating at the International House of Pancakes; it got the incumbent nowhere.

But foreign policy can still shape the outcome. First, as a wild card--something unpredictable and highly visual that grabs the country's attention. In 1980 President Carter authorized a secret mission to rescue the 52 Americans held hostage in Iran. When the rescue helicopters crashed in a sandstorm, it took a lot of the air out of his campaign. A more recent example of the kind of highly publicized incident that could wound Al Gore did not occur in an election year. It was the videotape of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. Imagine if American peacekeepers in Kosovo got shot on TV. The combination of Americans' low tolerance for casualties and riveting video would quickly turn up the heat on the vice president.

But that would probably hurt Gore only if he mishandled it. Most of the time, the particulars of foreign policy--even if they involve an unpredictable event--are much less significant than the impression conveyed. In that sense, foreign policy issues are essentially surrogates for larger questions of leadership. Even at the height of the cold war, voters in 1960 didn't care much about Quemoy and Matsu, the tiny islands off Taiwan that John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon sparred over. If exit polls had existed then, it's unlikely that many voters would have mentioned "the missile gap" with the Soviet Union, a big (and phony) charge that Kennedy leveled at the Eisenhower administration. But both were essential to Kennedy, then only 43 years old, seeming tough enough to be president. Sometimes a gaffe can be pivotal. Carter got a boost in 1976 when the incumbent, Gerald Ford, seemed confused in a debate about whether Eastern Europe was under Soviet domination.

The 1988 campaign may be the most relevant model for this one. It featured an incumbent vice president (George Bush) against a popular governor (Michael Dukakis). Bush set about destroying Dukakis's standing to be president, in part by raising some questions about the depth of Dukakis's patriotism. (That's where the Pledge of Allegiance and visits to flag factories came in.) This time, when they do finally get around to foreign policy, Gore will try to undermine George W. Bush's standing to be president by raising questions about the depth of his knowledge in a highly complex world. Dukakis hurt himself by riding around in a tank looking like Snoopy. Gore hopes that the younger Bush hurts himself by sounding like Snoopy. Foreign policy this year will be a metaphor for whether Bush is ready for the job, and whether Gore can talk straight enough for the job. Short of a real crisis, the specifics will be incidental.

That will soon be the case for the Elián Gonzalez affair. If there's violence this week, Gore will pay for it all year; if there's not, he'll look like a panderer to a few smarter voters with long memories who expected better of him than to jeopardize the integrity of immigration law by breaking with his administration's handling of the case. Most likely, by November, the González case will seem like ancient history--a Pat Buchanan one-liner.