With Foreign Policy, It’s Style Over Substance

Last week, Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush asked his chief foreign policy advisor, Stanford University professor Condoleezza Rice, for an emergency lesson on how to pronounce all those troublesome Serbian names.

“It’s a good thing I’m a Slavic scholar,” joked Rice, who is fluent in Russian.

But the strategy behind the tutorial was no joking matter.

Last week’s popular uprising in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, suddenly thrust foreign policy to the forefront of a presidential campaign that had been focused on tax cuts and health care. But at issue isn’t the nuances of U.S. policy in the Balkans; it’s whether each candidate is capable of handling tough global challenges.

That’s why Bush wanted to make sure he could say “Milosevic” and “Kostunica,” the names of the main characters in Yugoslavia’s power struggle, just as fluently as his Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore. (The lesson worked; by the end of the week, Bush was slinging Serbo-Croatian consonants like an old Balkan hand.)

And that’s why aides say the Texas governor wants to talk more about national security issues in his two remaining debates with Gore, on Wednesday and Oct. 17: He wants to convince more voters that he is sure-footed enough to handle that part of the presidency.

“The substance of foreign policy matters less than the way the candidates handle questions about it, and what that says about their leadership ability,” said pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank.

“The public’s level of interest [in Yugoslavia] has been modest,” he said. “But an issue like this can make a candidate appear either qualified or inept, and that can make a difference.”

And Bush has been vulnerable on that count. Admittedly less experienced in foreign policy than Gore, he mangled the names of several nationalities (for example, “Grecians” for Greeks and “East Timorians” for East Timorese) early in the campaign, setting up months of jokes by late-night comedians. Polls found that many voters who admired Bush as decisive or likable still gave Gore the edge on the question of experience.

So Bush studied up, under the tutelage of Rice and others. He gave a series of foreign policy speeches; he proposed a nuclear arms policy initiative; he made military renewal a major theme at the Republican National Convention and in his campaign.

In last week’s debate with Gore in Boston, Bush seemed at ease suggesting how the Clinton administration could help ease Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic out of power.

“This would be an interesting moment for the Russians to step up and lead as well,” Bush said. “It would be a wonderful time for the president of Russia to step into the Balkans and convince Mr. Milosevic it’s in his best interest and his country’s best interest to leave office.”

Gore, sensing an opening, pounced: “Now, I understand what the governor has said about asking the Russians to be involved, and under some circumstances that might be a good idea. But being as they have not yet been willing to recognize [opposition leader Vojislav] Kostunica as the lawful winner of the election, I’m not sure that it’s right for us to invite the president of Russia to mediate this dispute there, because we might not like the result that comes out of that.”

However, Bush had not used the word “mediate.” And later in the week, it became clear that President Clinton had asked Russia to do just what Bush was suggesting.

That discovery prompted a furious counterattack from the Bush campaign.

“Either [Gore] didn’t know [what Clinton was doing] or he deliberately just said something for political purposes to mock Gov. Bush when he knew Gov. Bush was making the right point . . . both of which would belie his claim to tremendous expertise in foreign policy,” Bush advisor Rice said.

In fact, there was no significant difference between the two candidates concerning what policy the United States should follow in Yugoslavia. Instead, Rice said, “this was a clever way of trying to question the governor’s experience and competence in foreign policy.”

On that, the Gore campaign agreed. “Gov. Bush showed that he’s not ready to lead the nation,” Gore spokesman Douglas Hattaway said.

Bush and Gore do differ on at least one significant foreign policy issue: the question of U.S. military intervention in cases of genocide or humanitarian disaster.

In the Boston debate, Bush said he would use military force only if “vital national interests” were at stake, and he offered a relatively restrictive definition: “whether or not our territory is threatened or people could be harmed; whether or not our alliances, our defense alliances, are threatened; whether or not our friends in the Middle East are threatened.”

Gore agreed with Bush that “we should be reluctant” to commit military force abroad. But he added: “Just because we don’t want to get involved everywhere doesn’t mean we should back off anywhere it comes up. . . . I think that there are situations, like in Bosnia or Kosovo, where there’s a genocide where our national security is at stake.”

Bush supported the U.S. intervention in Kosovo last year, but only reluctantly. He has said he would oppose U.S. intervention against genocide in Central Africa, because the area poses no vital interest for the United States; Gore has said he would consider intervening there under some circumstances.

But such debate has drawn relatively little attention from either the public or the media, perhaps because it seems hypothetical.

“Foreign policy is a factor when American lives are being lost or are at stake,” Republican pollster Bill McInturff said. “When American lives are not being lost or at stake, there’s no real foreign policy debate.”

Instead, he said, such issues as Yugoslavia or the Middle East show up in polling as “invisible blips.”

For example, he said, “Bush has made a real effort to get some traction on the issue of military preparedness. Do I think people are going to vote for him because of that? No.”

By the same token, however, Bush’s relative inexperience doesn’t hurt him much, McInturff said. In this year’s Republican primary campaign, he said, GOP voters told pollsters that they “did not perceive [foreign policy] as Gov. Bush’s strong suit, but they did not feel badly about that. They knew that not every person knows everything.”

During the Cold War, which ran through 11 presidential elections from 1948 to 1988, foreign policy was a bigger factor, the pollsters said.

“In those days, the question was: ‘Which candidate should have his finger on the nuclear button?’ ” the Pew Center’s Kohut said. “Now it’s more: ‘What kind of manager and domestic policy leader is this?’ ”

“People don’t vote on the basis of which candidate is better prepared on foreign policy. If that were the case, [then-President] George Bush wouldn’t have gotten whomped in 1992,” McInturff said.

Instead, he added, voters merely want to know whether each candidate has cleared “the minimum bar” for foreign policy competence--and “the minimum bar has been reset in a post-Cold War world,” McInturff said. “Any reasonable politician who can get the nomination of a major party will be seen as reaching the minimum threshold.”

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So, How Do You Say It?

Here is a quick guide to the pronunciation of the names of the present and former Yugoslavian presidents.

* VOJISLAV KOSTUNICA: VAW-yee-slahv kosh-TOO’-nee-tzuh

* SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC: slaw-BAW’-dahn mee-LAW’-sheh-vitch

*

Source: Associated Press