How Lee Got His Groove Back

By Andy Jackson

Lee Myung-bak is not dead yet.

In fact, after enduring a spring and early summer of protests and plunging support, his position now looks stronger than it has in months.

The latest poll from the research service Realmeter has Lee's approval rating at 35.2 percent. While hardly a ringing show of support, it is a major improvement on the 16.5 percent rating he had on July 30 and is a perfectly acceptable number for modern Korean presidents.

The American beef issue, the single biggest cause for his previous troubles, is turning around.

MBC TV was forced to apologize on Aug. 12 after the Korea Communications Commission concluded that a report by the station's PD Notebook news program on supposed American mad cow disease was false and biased.

That report (which aired on April 29) and a subsequent Internet rumor campaign helped put tens of thousands of protesters on the streets for several months and was the major reason behind the fall of Lee's popularity during the spring.

People do not like be taken for fools. The KCC ruling and MBC's apology have further drained the already declining support for the anti-American beef and anti-Lee Myung-bak protests.

The government's stricter measures against the remaining protesters have also improved Lee's standing among conservatives, who were alarmed by the softer approach the police took during the spring.

Lee was also helped by events over the summer.

North Korea did its part to help Lee. The killing of a South Korean tourist by North Korean soldiers at the Mt. Geumgang resort in early July and Pyongyang's subsequent intransigence in refusing to allow a joint investigation of the incident increased public support for Lee's harder line stance on inter-Korean relations.

The renewed dispute over the Dokdo islets, triggered by the Japanese Education Ministry announcement of its plan to define Dokdo as part of Japanese territory, was certainly a godsend. It allowed Lee to play the nationalism card by recalling the Korean Ambassador to Japan from Tokyo and beefing up the annual military exercise held in the waters around the islets.

The dispute also briefly provided an alternative focus for protests, stealing oxygen from the anti-American beef protests just as leaders of the latter were working on reenergizing their campaign ahead of the Aug. 6 summit with President Bush.

The summit with Bush also raised Lee's political fortunes. In fact, the lead up to the summit may have boosted Lee more than the summit itself. Once again, Dokdo was the key factor.

On July 26, the Korean embassy in Washington discovered that the Board on Geographic Names of the U.S. Geological Survey had changed its description of Dokdo in its database from South Korean administration to ``undesignated sovereignty."

Just five days later, after ``a very high-level" South Korean government official had contacted the Whitehouse about the issue, President Bush told a group of Asian reporters that he had ordered the original description to be restored to the database. The order was carried out later that same day.

The speed of the restoration was a boost to Lee as it signaled that his policy of improving US-Korean relations was already bearing fruit.

The summit itself, while hardly earth-shattering in significance, did highlight Lee's rapprochement initiative with Washington.

During a post-summit joint press conference, Bush reiterated that the U.S. government was going to included Korea in its visa waiver program, saying ``We're working to speed [Korea's] entry into the visa waiver program. The idea is to get it done by the end of this year.'' Inclusion in the program would allow Koreans to stay up to 90 days in the United States without a visa.

The best that Roh had been able to get from Bush was a promise to provide Seoul a ``roadmap to assist South Korea in meeting the requirements for membership.''

Korean entry into the program has been problematic because the country has consistently failed to meet the required 97% approval rate for nonimmigrant visa applicants. The issue has taken on symbolic importance to Koreans, who see their country's exclusion from the program as not fitting with Korea's status as a developed nation and a close U.S. ally.

The summit itself was almost more noteworthy for what was not said than for what was.

While both leaders acknowledged that the topic of sending Korean non-combat troops back to Afghanistan was discussed, there was no Korean commitment to do so (although that may change as we get closer to next year's spring offensive). That is a stark change from the Roh administration, which felt obliged to commit Korean troops to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to patch up rocky relations with Washington.

Lee's series of successes was followed by the Olympics. The Games' domination of media coverage essentially locked in Lee's improved political position for the rest of the summer by pushing protests and other political news aside in the public's mind.

Of course, Lee could stumble again and he still faces serious opposition on several fronts. For example, Buddhist organizations are planning a major protest on August 27 over what they see as Lee's pro-Christian bias.

Most ominously, the economy has continued the teetering that has worried administration officials since the President took office in February. There have been increasing calls for the Lee administration to pick up the pace of economic reform before the economy goes into recession. With the National Assembly finally getting to business after an opposition boycott, he will have no excuse for not getting the ball rolling.

If Lee can't help steer the economy through this rough patch, he could very well see his public support permanently plunge.

Then this summer's comeback will seem like just a temporary reprieve.

Andy Jackson teaches American government in the Lakeland College bridge program at Ansan College, Gyeonggi Province. He can be reached at andyinrok@lycos.com.