After Abe

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

One would hope the Republicans’ defeat in the 2006 election would have taught them something about the folly of tarnishing a political brand name. If not, they need only look to Tokyo, where Prime Minister Abe has just resigned in the wake of the defeat of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party in the July Upper House elections. They will find that these setbacks resulted from a lack of substance, infidelity to principle, and corruption in ways that eerily resemble the failures of congressional Republicans here in America.

Although Mr. Abe inherited the reform mantle of his predecessor, the still popular Junichiro Koizumi, he and his policy advisers made an early decision to shy away from the “small government” agenda they had been contemplating for fear that spending controls would be too politically difficult. Instead, Mr. Abe ran as a national security hawk and a proponent of feelgood patriotism that expressed a vision of Japan as “a beautiful country” in the community of “normal nations” led for the first time by a prime minister born after the Pacific War. Mr. Abe brifly enjoyed the high approval ratings of his predecessor, who had stepped down to honor a term-limit pledge. But in less than a year, the fundamental errors of Mr. Abe’s approach led to disaster.

After campaigning on national security and a more assertive Japanese posture in respect of Communist China and North Korea, Mr. Abe made his first act on taking office a visit to China and South Korea to tell their leaders, apparently, that he did not really mean what he said on the stump. He achieved a quick boost in the polls of a public that felt reassured by his more conciliatory approach, but he also alienated his core national security constituency . In another gesture, Mr. Abe welcomed back into the LDP a number of porkbarrel kingpins whom Mr. Koizumi had expelled and campaigned against. A number of those whom Mr. Koizumi challenged were defeated by younger, reform-oriented candidates. Mr. Abe’s good-will gesture was taken as a signal that reform was over.

Like President Bush, Mr. Abe was born to a political dynasty. His grandfather was premier and his father served as foreign minister. Those who have met him know that he can exude a patrician grandeur as well as charm. Yet he filled his cabinet with grandchildren of his grandfather’s cronies. The best light Mr. Abe’s supporters could put on this maneuver was that he meant it as another gesture of reconciliation — or that he believed that the cabinet was of secondary importance to a program he could carry alone. But gaffes, scandals, and incompetence showed that Mr. Abe was the captive of his own cabinet and not the other way around. No fewer than four ministers resigned, and one committed suicide.

By failing to focus on the economy, and having a growth-oriented plan to help regions of Japan that suffered from the combined impact of recession and Mr. Koizumi’s cutbacks in public spending, Mr. Abe seemed out of touch. Just as the House Republicans would occasionally whip their members on symbolic votes to appease what a former majority leader, Richard Armey, would call the “Dr. Dobson” constituency, Mr. Abe tried to offer a culturally conservative policy of symbols to rally his own party base. In America, this can be effective politics, if there is policy to shrink the size of government, cut spending, and avoid alienating libertarians and reformers. But just as the House Republicans offered values votes as flimsy cover for their earmarks, Mr. Abe offered too little, if any, substantive economic reform. He backtracked on Mr. Koizumi’s signature effort to privatize the postal system. Mr. Abe’s Katrina was a scandal over government record-keeping for the Japanese pension system, no small matter in one of the oldest societies in the world.

The tragedy of Mr. Abe’s administration was that for all his domestic failures, he was a proponent of a stronger American-Japanese security alliance to handle the threats of Chinese communism and Islamist terror. Mr. Abe hoped to revise the Japanese constitution and pass laws so that Japan could be a more equal partner of America, not just in Asia but in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr. Abe said he would resign rather than risk losing a vote in the Diet on continuing Japan’s support of refueling operations for the United States Navy and allied NATO vessels in the Indian Ocean. In the end, he was forced to resign as prime minister. His political failure is reminder that a party that builds its franchise on economic growth and reform as well as national security cannot afford to stint the growth and reform agenda.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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