Leadership and Commander-in-Chief

“Analysis: In aftermath of daring raid, Obama reintroducing himself to nation

By Associated Press, Updated: Friday, May 6, 4:19 AM

WASHINGTON — It was just a firehouse chat with the guys of Engine 54 in lower Manhattan. But President Barack Obama delivered a message he hopes will also hit home with every American in this week of national catharsis: “You’re always going to have a president and an administration who’s got your back.”

In the denouement to the daring raid that brought down Osama bin Laden, the president has in effect been reintroduced to the nation.

While taking care to strike the right tone — trying to savor the success of the dramatic covert operation without appearing to gloat — Obama has offered himself as a decisive leader willing to take bold risks.

He’s gotten a bump in the polls that isn’t likely to last. But Americans may well come away with altered perceptions of a president whose strongest personal qualities in past polls have run to squishier traits like being a good communicator and friendly.

“It sheds a new light on him,” says pollster Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. “What happened here may improve impressions that he is a strong and forceful leader, and that’s the enduring potential benefit.”

Obama’s understated victory lap — not that he would ever call it that — continues on Friday in Kentucky, where he’ll meet privately at Fort Campbell with some of the participants in the assault on bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway and in public with U.S. troops returning from Afghanistan.

The president has been careful to shower credit and praise for the successful raid on the U.S. military and the nation’s intelligence and counterterrorism apparatus, and to frame this as a time for Americans to set aside politics and conjure the unity that the nation felt after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But it is inescapable that he is not only a president. He also is a candidate for re-election. And the successful raid can only do him good politically.

Contrast the competing images of Obama at New York’s ground zero on Thursday, meeting with first responders and families of those lost in the terror attacks, with those from Greenville, S.C., where the first debate of GOP presidential contenders played out Thursday night. The event attracted a field of relative unknowns lacking in foreign policy experience.

For now, even Obama’s political opponents are willing to give him his due.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a GOP presidential hopeful who declined to participate in the South Carolina debate, gave no-strings-attached credit to the president, the military and the intelligence community earlier in the week, calling it “a great victory for lovers of freedom and justice everywhere.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has never shied from criticism of the Obama administration, also offered up credit to the president and his national security team. But he coupled it with a reminder that each president has built upon the work of his predecessor.

“We picked up on items that had been collected during the Clinton administration and worked those aggressively for eight years,” Cheney said in a TV interview after the raid. “We passed that on to the Obama administration. They picked it up and they’ve been working it.””