Will the president get a bump in the polls?

Some argue that bin Laden's death opens the door to new spending cuts.
Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations who served as a top State Department official in the Bush administration, said Monday that bin Laden’s death “raises questions about our strategy in Afghanistan."
While the successful "shows the continued promise of tactical counter-terrorism operations," he said, it also "reinforces also the question of whether the course we’re on — which has a large element of nation-building and capacity-building and counterinsurgency within Afghanistan — can succeed, given the willingness of Pakistan to provide sanctuary for at least the Afghan Taliban, not to mention others.”
Haass said bin Laden’s demise “will very much play into a growing debate as we move towards July 1 about the proper trajectory of U.S. policy in Afghanistan — more specifically about the rate of drawdown in U.S. forces.”
In other words, successful tactical counter-terrorism — done in Navy Seal operations or drone attacks from Yemen to Pakistan — might not require 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and a former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration, said bin Laden’s killing “might open space for the Obama administration to ease its way out of Afghanistan, if it so chooses, not because the threat will be dramatically less, but because they’ll be able to (in the phrase attributed to Sen. George Aiken about the Vietnam War) ‘declare victory and go home’ — if they want to. We’ll see whether they want to.”
Lawmakers are divided about what bin Laden's death could — or should — mean for troop levels in Afghanistan.
In a campaign e-mail, Rep. Chellie Pingree, D- Maine, urged her supporters to sign a petition to "send a strong message (to Obama) that people in Maine and around the country want the decade-long war to end, want our troops out of harm's way, and want to focus on the many pressing issues facing us here at home."
But a counsel of caution came from one of the Senate’s hawks, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I – Conn., who told reporters Monday, “I’ve already heard a few calls that we quickly withdraw from Afghanistan because ‘the war is over,’ because bin Laden is dead. I wish we could say that."
But, he warned, "if we did that, we would repeat a mistake that we made once before when we pulled out of Afghanistan and that region after the Soviets did and that invited the Taliban and al Qaida into Afghanistan, and from Afghanistan they attacked us on 9-11."

Going after waste — and much more Asked about military spending in the wake of the bin Laden killing, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Monday that senators on the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees are “looking for any waste in the Pentagon. Secretary Gates is doing the same thing.”

But there’s far more at stake than waste. Despite battles with members of Congress and lobbyists over individual items such as an extra engine for the F–35 fighter, Gates is mostly trying to squeeze savings out of the Pentagon as a private-sector CEO would with an overgrown corporation: by shrinking headcount and cutting health care costs.

And, even when it comes to defense costs that would seem to be focused on guns and steel, it turns out that there’s no escaping from the health care debate.

As Gates told the Senate earlier this year, “Sharply rising health care costs are consuming an ever-larger share of this Department’s budget,” growing from $19 billion in 2001 to $52.5 billion in the budget request for fiscal year 2012.

He has proposed what he calls “modest increases” to the fee charged for enrolling in TRICARE, the health care plan which covers uniformed service members, retirees and their families.

He said the Pentagon’s current health care plan, “one in which fees have not increased for 15 years, is simply unsustainable, and if allowed to continue, the Defense Department risks the fate of other corporate and government bureaucracies that were ultimately crippled by personnel costs, in particular, their retiree benefit packages.”