Bhutto Killing Tests Presidential Candidates

WEBSTER CITY, Iowa - For the presidential candidates, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto has emerged as a ghoulish sort of test: A chance to project leadership and competence - or not - on a fast-moving and nuanced foreign policy issue.

Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Democrats who have struggled to attract voters' attention, edged into the spotlight Friday after talking about Pakistan for weeks.

Biden tried to sound presidential as he expressed concern about loose nuclear weapons in Pakistan, and he also emphasized his foresight by noting that he had long called Pakistan "the most dangerous nation on the planet."

Richardson, a former diplomat, made an effort to cast himself as a man of action, calling for President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan to step down.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., spent the day asserting their own personal expertise: their private conversations with Bhutto and Musharraf, their visits to Pakistan and their concerns about fallout affecting the nation's nuclear arsenal to the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

McCain, speaking in New Hampshire, also sought to convey leader-to-leader chemistry when he said Musharraf was a "personally scrupulously honest" man who deserved "the benefit of the doubt" on uniting Pakistan.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the leading Republican in polls of Iowa caucusgoers, found himself on the defensive Friday, trying to clarify earlier remarks in which he said the chaos in Pakistan underscored the need to build a fence on the U.S. border with Mexico, and that "any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country" should be monitored.

A series of misstatements in discussing the issue could buttress criticism that Huckabee lacks experience on foreign policy.

Weighing In On The Crisis

The Bhutto assassination is one of those rare things in a presidential race - an unscripted, unexpected moment that lays bare a candidate's leadership qualities and geopolitical smarts.

Think of bin Laden's videotape message late in the 2004 election - giving President Bush a chance to look more commanding than his opponent, Sen. John Kerry - or the twists of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980, as Ronald Reagan made President Jimmy Carter look feckless.

All of the contenders rushed to weigh in, determined and eager to use the moment to show command of issues both large (Pakistan's relations with India and Afghanistan) and small (the proper pronunciation of Rawalpindi, the garrison city where Bhutto died).

While there were some stabs at substance - Clinton called for an independent investigation into Bhutto's death, and Richardson called for cutting off all aid to Pakistan - most of the candidates concentrated on projecting the aura of a steady hand in a crisis.

"Pakistan is a foreign policy problem that requires nuance and finesse, so it's a great test of presidential mettle," said Xenia Dormandy, director of the Belfer Center's Project on India and the Subcontinent at Harvard University.

"There are so many priorities: Building a democracy, the war on terror, nonproliferation. I do think we're going to see a split between those candidates who have the experience to recognize the complexities, and those who are just determined to play the politics on this one."

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., sounded like both a leader and a candidate on Pakistan. At one point, he said he would suspend some military aid to Pakistan if the government did not hold free elections and clamp down on terrorist groups. At another point, though, he suggested that the war in Iraq - which his rivals Clinton, Edwards, and others had voted for - had "resulted in us taking our eye off the ball" in pursuing al-Qaida and bringing stability to the region.

Out Of The Loop

Some candidates had moments, meanwhile, that sounded a bit out of the presidential loop. Mitt Romney said that, if he had been president, he would have gathered information from "our CIA bureau chief in Islamabad." The CIA has station chiefs.

Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, invoked Ronald Reagan as a great foreign policy leader, saying , "he was a governor, not a so-called foreign policy expert."

Most of the candidates talked Friday about the need for democracy in Pakistan, and no one has stressed that theme more frequently than President Bush himself. But as the complexity of the situation there has set in on the Bush administration in recent years, the talk of democracy has contrasted sharply with the need for stability, something Rudy Giuliani talked about.

The Bush administration's approach so far has been to back Musharraf at all costs; only McCain echoed that.