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The future of the Lee Myung-bak administration looks bleak only a month after it took office. President Lee himself appears to have forgotten why the public chose him by such an overwhelming margin, and the public seems to be forgetting that it has changed government. The notions of a "lost decade," an end to leftwing politics and economic recovery are already fading, and rampant political wrangles about nominations of parliamentary candidates and personnel decisions have taken center stage.
In a nutshell, what is missing is political leadership on the part of the president and the Grand National Party. That flaw is evident in poor personnel appointments. The new administration sustained heavy wounds in the course of filling key posts in the Cabinet and elsewhere in government, and stirred up trouble in the process of nominating candidates for the National Assembly. The core of the problem is with the appointment of key personnel.
Someone has likened personnel reshuffles in politics to changing the water in a goldfish bowl. Both have to be done gradually. In politics, the wheels are kept in motion by a certain proportion of party elders or multi-term lawmakers. You need people who can play a bridging role between the new and old, who coordinate different views within a party, and who can conduct behind-the-scenes negotiations with the opposition. These qualities require slowly accumulated influence, experience and trust. But the GNP, busy overthrowing the old order, has lost its shock absorbers. This is bound to drive Korean politics, already beginning to make a fetish of cleanliness, without the buffers straight into a brick wall. It will prove major problem for Lee in his politics with the legislature and the opposition.
In addition, the nominations will bring many contrarians and marginal figures within the party to prominence. Party factions that barely managed to rub along since the presidential election have reverted to antagonism. The course of action taken by those eliminated in the party nomination on the one hand and the new faces and forces brought into the party over the presidential election on the other could tear the party apart. And that will make it impossible for Lee to control the party. A single-term president, it is said, is a lame duck the moment he is elected. The GNP will turn into a five-year battleground in the wake of the parliamentary election. Former GNP chairwoman Park Geun-hye¡¯s press conference on Sunday signals it.
In contrast, the United Democratic Party is getting over its presidential election panic rather quickly. It has beaten the GNP in the image fight over nominations. Despite the fact that the clique who formed the base of the Roh Moo-hyun administration have mostly made a comeback while only a dozen Kim Dae-jung associates were ousted, Park Jae-seung, the head of the UDP's nomination committee, has become something of a hero by eliminating candidates convicted of corruption. Compared with the GNP, where internal strife got worse after it got eliminated 35 percent of sitting lawmakers, the UDP has in fact changed little except the party name and its head -- and even he will go if he doesn¡¯t get elected in his new constituency.
The essence of Lee's leadership is yet to emerge. But judging from his recent actions, he does look like little more than a CEO president: an administrator, good at listening to briefings and issuing instructions, rather than a statesman with political vision. That is a problem if that means he doesn't involve himself deeply in party affairs; but it¡¯s also problematic if what we see is in fact the outcome of deep involvement. On purpose or not, Lee is behaving pretty much the way he did as a Hyundai executive, where subordinates would follow him if he just pointed them in the right direction. But if he thinks the entire public will be moved if he shows himself to be open to suggestions once he has given some examples and pinpointed a few problems, he has a wrong perception of the times. The presidency is not a job for a lone outstanding individual.
We tend to assume that the presidential election somehow automatically determined the course and direction of our politics, and the wheels are already in motion. But the situation inside the ruling and opposition parties suggests the Dec. 19 presidential election was nothing but a skirmish preceding the real battle for Korean politics in the April 19 general election. The impact of the presidential election is already being diluted. It may have done little more than deliver a change of president while splitting the GNP and leading to the possible emergence of a couple of new parties.
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