New Government, New Start

Lee Should Reignite Koreans' Passion for Progress

Lee Myung-bak is to be officially sworn in as the Republic of Korea's 17th president today. President Lee makes his start with far greater political capital than his predecessors, as shown by his election victory by the largest margin in history, the atmosphere of which will likely continue through parliamentary polls in April. He should use it very skillfully ― and modestly ― to prove the country is just suffering growing pains, and not that it has stopped growing.

There will be many hurdles along the way, however. Foreign policy appears to be rather easy, but there are signs Lee will make it unnecessarily difficult. A case in point is his North Korean policy.

This is one area in which Lee's thinly-veiled principle of "anything-but-Roh" should not be applied, as evidenced in the U.S. Clinton-Bush change of command. The new president has made it clear Seoul could stop non-humanitarian economic aid and raise the North's human rights issues. Lee's stance toward Pyongyang is crystal clear in his appointment of a security-defense team filled with hard-liners. After two months of quiet observation, Pyongyang seems to be moving toward an eye-for-an-eye tactic. When Seoul takes a more hawkish North Korea policy than even that of the U.S. conservatives, the biggest victim will likely be Lee himself.

Relations with the United States may turn better than ever, at least until Washington demands more actions than words or Lee disappoints them. More worrisome is how he would maintain his pro-American and pro-Japanese policy without hurting other participants in the six-way conference, namely China and Russia.

The new leader has shown his greatest confidence in the economy, raising popular expectations to rather unreasonably high levels. Lamentably ― and dangerously, for his party ― lacking in his economic blueprint is a strategy to narrow the polarizing income gap. Lee says robust growth would shed light into darker corners of the economy, but there are no guarantees the economy will expand as he wants it to, particularly at a time when the global economy seems to slide into a stagflation.

All these may be surmountable, though, if only he could unify the nation and re-inject sufficient motivation and enthusiasm into the hardest-working people in the world. We hope the "best-of-best" Cabinet and Cheong Wa Dae staff (as Lee described them), many of whom are Ivy Leaguers and multimillionaires, perform well, while understanding the growing hardships of mid- to-low-income earners. After all, an administration with humbler backgrounds and a more populist way of thinking failed to solve their problems.

We wish the new government the best of best and make only one request to it: You may as well be business-friendly and press-friendly. Could you be a little more "people-friendly," too?