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Assessing the four years of his tenure on Wednesday, President Roh Moo-hyun said he has nothing to regret except real estate policies. On Thursday, he said he was ¡°confident," and threatened to confront public prosecutors, business and the media, which he called "vested interests." Earlier he told a Cabinet meeting, "I've been patient with the attacks on me many times, but from now on, I'll explain and respond each time such a thing happens."
If you were to read the remarks to someone without disclosing who made them, they would guess it was some cantankerous activist making the usual noises without any concern for the consequences. But a president should first of all be like a president. That means he must be able to give the people, supporters and detractors alike, the confidence that he is the ultimate guarantor of the country¡¯s security and the wellbeing of its people. A country under a presidential system is based on that trust. But President Roh is now shaking his fists at the people in every walk of life and eroding that vital confidence.
Roh may find it difficult to feel his administration's misrule and incompetence acutely -- he is , after all, not a victim but a perpetrator of the damage. Those who feel it every day are small vendors in the markets, taxi drivers, restaurant owners, students looking for jobs, straw widowers who have sent their children abroad to study accompanied by their mothers, young couples aspiring to buy their own home, the poor despairing of how to survive the winter, and owners of small and medium-sized businesses.
Apart from anything else, North Korea tested a nuclear device two months ago. Many experts at home and abroad note that South Korea now faces the worst security crisis since the end of the Korean War. In such circumstances, the president ought to rally our national strength by humbly reconciling and encouraging the people. Instead, Roh disparages and ridicules them saying they are "frightened out of their wits," and cites dismantling the unblemished Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command as an achievement.
He seems to have made up his mind to have out every personal disappointment with the people during his remaining tenure of a year and two months. When the activist president threatens to give the country a whipping, only the people themselves can safeguard the country.
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