Led by the President the White House is doing its best to get control of the Christmas bombing situation, but the fact that the twelve days of Christmas are over and the story is still big news is not good.
There are four reasons this story got so out of control.
First, it really is a big story. More than eight years after 9/11 there are clearly still some basic vulnerabilities in the air transport system. The successful destruction of an airliner with its passengers and crew on Christmas Day would have been a tragedy for the victims and their families and a huge shock to the nation.
Second, the White House – and the President – dropped the ball early on and they’ve been playing catch up ever since. If the initial response had matched the kind of tough and focused response we’ve seen since the new year, the White House wouldn’t have gotten into an ugly defensive crouch and the political damage would have been much, much less.
Third, the story was a godsend to a press which otherwise would have had to fill the empty space of the holidays with manufactured news. The end of December is like a mini-August when the press is scrambling for something, anything to write about. A major legitimate story in that period was guaranteed to draw obsessive coverage.
Finally, the Christmas attempt was part of a disturbing pattern. 2009 has seen a significant increase in what many Americans believe to be terror attacks on U.S. soil. (Fort Hood, for example.) The narrative that a lawyer-run, PC-happy, Miranda-crazed administration is coddling criminals rather than protecting the people has been gaining a kind of subterranean credibility out there past the Beltway. The fluffed early response strengthened this very corrosive and dangerous perception out there. Throw in the CIA assassination in Afghanistan and the meltdown in Yemen, and the administration was already in trouble on this one.
Short term, the corner may have been turned regardless of whether heads roll. But the administration has got to understand that getting the policy and the perceptions right on homeland security is job number one. Not even low unemployment will save the administration if Americans think that it can’t or won’t protect them from the bad guys.