On the website WowOWow.com, CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl on Tuesday declared about the Osama bin Laden takedown "The initial reaction is triumphant: a feeling of justice done; of unfinished business dealt with; of a hurtful wound cauterized." But then she wondered about luck:
The next step for me was thinking about Barak [sic] Obama and luck. If there’s one thing we Americans want and expect from our presidents, it’s that they’re blessed with good fortune, and that they then spray their fairy dust on the rest of us.
When Jimmy Carter sat in the Oval Office, you got to think the gods had turned against him, with his double-digit inflation and gas lines. You knew he had lost his mantle of heaven when his helicopter mission to recue the American hostages in Iran failed tragically in a sandstorm.
When Ronald Reagan took over, he seemed to be charmed. We often commented on his good luck. The luck of the Irish! It was part of his popularity.
And now President Obama – whose stars seemed to be aligning badly – may have his luck restored. Not a single American casualty in this operation. And he pulled off the mission just when the country most needs a jolt of self-confidence.
The next step for me was to ask: Why’d it take ten years to find OBL? There he was “hiding” not in a cave, but near or on a Pakistani military compound, apparently protected by the very government we’ve been propping up with billions in U.S. aid. Are we chumps?
Don’t answer that.
Stahl wanted to stick with "overjoyedness. I want to go out and shake hands with strangers, my fellow Americans. This is one of those moments we can share without a squabble, without any words at all. Just a smile and a nod. We got ‘em. It’s restorative."
I asked why the president had "threatened retaliation on Friday when the release seemed imminent." I'd put him in a tight spot. I knew it.
He lapsed into Bushspeak about not wanting to "escalate a rhetorical output about what we might or might not do as the United States of America down the road." Then I couldn't resist:
STAHL: Would you like to apologize to Jimmy Cater for some of the statements you made about his "pussy footing around" when he was waiting and hoping he could bring those hostages, those Iranian hostages, home safely?
BUSH: Well, no. And again, I don't want to get into that. This isn't the time to finger point or to try to say whether we did it better than Jimmy Carter, worse than Jimmy Carter, or something of that nature. I'm sorry, I view this with too much solemnity to get into that.
Stahl wasn't solemn. She "couldn't resist" doing her usual partisan CBS badgering. On page 241, she recalls the Achille Lauro hostage-taking in 1985 as lucky for Reagan:
The president had the public by the heart but not by the mind. he was not helped by the huge budget deficit, the sluggish productivity rate, the compounding national debt, and the decline in the value of the dollar.
But as a friend once explained to me, if the American people have a choice between a politician who is smart and a politician who is lucky, they'll go with lucky every time. And Reagan was their man. Just as his second term was turning into a country called Disaster, back roared his good fortune.
I doubt Reagan would have called Palestinians murdering Leon Klinghoffer and taking Americans hostage "good luck for me." Only journalists and political cynics think that way.
