Power Transition
By Tong Kim
President-elect Lee Myung-bak has been busy, working hard to prepare for the right start of his new government due for inauguration on Feb. 25. Elected by a landslide with a record margin of more than 5 million votes over his closest challenger Chung Dong-young, there is no doubt that he has a mandate to lead the country according to his own policy vision for the next five years.
A telling message from the last presidential election is good news for all: ``Democracy works in Korea and rule of law has become one of the basic tenets for politics. Korean democracy is mature and strong. The strength of democracy for good or bad
is that people can change their rulers if they do not like them.
During the campaign period candidate Lee Myung-bak made several pledges to carry out as President. It is normal to make attractive campaign promises in a democratic election, even if some of them might not be realistic or desirable, as long as they are cleverly designed to enlist the voters' support.
Now that the election is behind, the president-elect ― soon to be President for all citizens ― including those who did not vote for him, who account for roughly 50 percent of those who cast their votes in an election in which only 62 percent of the eligible voters participated, must broaden the horizon of his policy options ― for both domestic and foreign agendas.
As I pointed out in my last column, the December election was not determined by policy issues, but by the voters' dissatisfaction with the Roh Moo-hyun government and their strong desire for a change of government thereof.
The average voter was not familiar with the details of candidate Lee Myung-bak's policy platforms other than the widely accepted general perception that he is the one who can rebuild the economy. In this sense, Lee Myung-bak's priority is to focus on economic issues. That's the mandate he got from the people.
Other than that, the next president should not be strictly bound by his campaign pledges. What he should do is review, refine, improve or change, even discard his campaign policy platforms if warranted. He may even accommodate some policy approaches that were advocated by his political opponents or some of the policy lines pursued by his predecessor. It should not matter whose idea it is if it is good.
There are no perfect solutions to all problems: there is no way to satisfactorily meet all demands from all walks of life in a democratic society that inherently faces conflicts of interests among its diverse rival groups.
In the meantime, we are some disturbing developments concerning the activities of the president-elect's transition team. People want change, but change does not have to be revolutionary in speed or substance. The task of the transition team is to prepare for the scheduled take-over of government by learning how the incumbent administration is running its business.
In the process the transition team naturally learns or confirms what the new government wants to change and how differently they want to run their government. The purpose is not to change everything or to end every effort by their predecessor. Continuity is also important in some cases.
As an agent of change, the president-elect wants downsizing of the government, reducing the number of cabinet agencies from 18 to about 14, but maintaining the same level of manpower in government, that has overgrown under the Roh government. The transition team calls their plan a "functional integration" or a streamlining of government functions for efficiency.
Functional reorganization should be accompanied by actual downsizing of government through a balanced budget and a realignment of reduced but productive government workers if it is to achieve ``small government" that would be less likely to interfere with the businesses.
In the course of discussing government reorganization, they considered the closing of the Ministry of Unification to cancel only after they realized that would not be a good idea. There was no need to publicize a plan that would be dropped in a week's time. This created the impression that they were acting on a rash judgment in a flip-flop fashion without a thorough study.
On the foreign policy front, Lee is sending special envoys to the four powers that are considered most important to Korea - the United States, China, Japan and Russia but not to North Korea. Lee is committed to an improved U.S.-Korea alliance and a proactive Asian diplomacy, but he did not need to begin with envoy diplomacy to achieve this goal even before his inauguration.
There is no urgent pending bilateral issue between Seoul and Washington. The current situation is different from five years ago when Roh Moo-hyun was perceived as Korea's first anti-American elected president. Washington knows and appreciates Lee's pro-American policy. Rethinking the timeline for transferring the wartime operation control to South Korea by April 2012 is premature.
Lee Myung-bak is reminded that he will work less than a year with the incumbent Bush administration but four years with its successor government that will likely be a Democratic administration, as the American people too want change after 8 years of Republican rule.
On North Korea, the president-elect is carefully committed to continued engagement for peaceful cooperation and humanitarian aid, but with emphasis on reciprocity from the North. The North Koreans are quietly watching what the new South Korean government will decide to do with them. History shows security is directly linked to economic prosperity for South Korea.
There is no gainsaying that a strong U.S.-Korea alliance is the bulwark of freedom and economic prosperity. But if South Korea is seen excessively dependent on the United States for its security or for resolution of North Korea's nuclear issue, it would be a regress, not a progress for South Korea. That's not something that Washington is seeking either. What's your take?
Tong Kim is former senior interpreter at the U.S. State Department and now a research professor with Ilmin Institute of International Relations at Korea University and a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University SAIS. He can be reached at tong.
.