By Tong Kim
The big election that will determine who will be the next president of South Korea is only two and a half months away. The battle will be fought between former Seoul mayor Lee Myung-bak of the Grand National Party (GNP) and the final winner from the three primary contenders of the pro-government United New Democratic Party (UNDP) _ Chung Dong-young, Lee Hae-chan and Sohn Hak-kyu.
The recent flap over Lee Myung-bak's mistakenly announced schedule for a meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush made me reflect on the impact of the U.S. preference or support for a particular candidate on Korean voters.
U.S. influence in Korea has waned over the decades of turbulent U.S.-Korea relations partly because of the inevitable security-first U.S. policy _ which led many Koreans to believe that the United States did not care about democracy in Korea until the 1980s _ and later more because of the natural evolution of a sounder bilateral relationship.
Preoccupied with its security interest during the Cold War era, Washington reluctantly or helplessly chose to support two military regimes that came into power by way of coup to last a quarter of a century.
There was a time when the United States had the ability to help elect or defeat a candidate. And there was a time when the military rulers needed U.S. endorsement to make up for their lack of political legitimacy. Whether the United States has ever overtly or subtly exercised such influence is an academic question.
In my view the United States today does not have the ability to defeat a candidate even if it wanted to do so, not to mention the ability to help elect a candidate. There is no dispute that the United States remains the single most important country to South Korea. And it will remain so for a long time to come but with a gradually diminishing influence on the lives of the Korean people.
Lee and his staff made a reckless political blunder when they confidently announced a meeting with Bush, which had never been scheduled.
Lee did not need to seek such a meeting to enhance his chances for an election victory through a questionable point of contact with the White House.
As the White House NSC spokesman clarified, it's been Washington's official position since the Reagan administration not to get involved in the presidential election politics of South Korea.
It best serves the interest of the United States to stay out of Korea's internal politics and to work with whoever the Korean people elect as their president.
Roh Tae-woo is the only Korean presidential candidate who met a U.S. president. Roh met Reagan for a five-minute photo op.
Even this brief encounter took place against the backdrop of Chun Do-hwan's letting go of his reins of power, which many in Washington feared may have been prolonged beyond his promised single term at that time: no Korean president had ever stepped down voluntarily before.
Roh ran against two democratic leaders _ Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam _ and won because of the split of the two Kims. Afterward, Kim Dae-jung thought that the United States had supported Roh, a military general instead of a democratic leader.
A year before President Kim Dae-jung was elected, he came to Washington as the de facto opposition candidate, and one of his zealous supporters _ who claimed he was a friend of a very close friend of the White House chief of staff _ told him that President Bill Clinton was waiting at the Oval Office to meet with him.
An aid to Kim asked me whether I could confirm this alleged appointment.
I called the appointment secretary at the White House to find that no such appointment was scheduled. Kim Dae-jung avoided a likely embarrassing scene at the West Gate of the White House, where he and his entourage would have had to turn back to return to the hotel under the watch of the press.
Lee Myung-back's private point of contact with the White House was identified as a Korean-American member of the National Council on Disability, a small federal agency making recommendations to the president and Congress on disability policy.
This man was reported as an ``assistant secretary" of the U.S. government in the Korean press, and he told Lee that a meeting with Bush had been arranged for mid-October.
Despite a denial by the U.S. Embassy in Seoul of such a meeting, the GNP foolhardily insisted that the party was still relying on the credibility of its unofficial source in Washington until the White House officially extinguished the commotion over a presidential meeting that had never been planned.
When the GNP's last presidential candidate Lee Hoi-chang came to Washington, he met with Vice President Dick Cheney but he lost to Roh Moo-hyun who had never visited the United States. Roh in fact was elected with the support of anti-American sentiments in Korea.
It was a serious mistake for Lee Myung-bak's people if they had thought a meeting with Bush would offset any disadvantage that may stem from President Roh's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
In an attempt to diffuse criticisms, the GNP argued that its candidate was going to discuss mainly economic cooperation with the incumbent American president. But that poor argument did not hold.
Having stumbled over his plan to visit Washington, Lee now has been seen as lacking in diplomatic discretion as a prospective president and even as misreading the ambivalent attitudes of the Korean voters toward the Bush administration.
South Korea is a maturing democracy with a prosperous economy and a growing sense of independence. And it is best for the United States to stay out of South Korea's internal politics.
And it is also best for South Korean politicians not to seek or pretend to have U.S. support, as such an attempt would only backfire.
Tong Kim, a former U.S. State Department interpreter, is now a research professor at the Ilmin Institute of International Relations of Korea University and a fellow at the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He can be reached at tong.kim@prodigy.net.