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Judging by experience, Moon is ahead. He worked as chief of staff for President Roh Moo-hyun, among other posts.
Roh wished to project Korea as an honest broker to coordinate among the United States, China and Japan. He was ahead of his time, according to his supporters, but his detractors blamed his half-hearted policy for twisting the ROK-U.S. alliance. Moon was on Roh's side to push for the settlement of a free trade agreement with the U.S., a move that alienated progressives from the Roh administration. Moon later regretted the pact. Also Moon played the role of backstopping in Seoul when Roh went to Pyongyang for the second inter-Korean summit. Then, he coordinated a principals' meeting when a group of Korean Christians were kidnapped in Afghanistan on a conversion mission. The hostages were released but it left a question mark about whether the Roh government had paid off the Taliban.
On Ahn' side, he has no security experience whatsoever. He was pushed onto the political scene as an anti-establishment contender but he relinquished his bid to back Moon five years ago. Then, Ahn was nicknamed "come and pull out," a play on the Korean homonym of his first name, for frequently failing to stand his ground.
Then, Moon should beat Ahn hands down if experience prevails over the lack of it. But it has not worked that way so far. Kim Tae-hyo, a senior security aide to the former conservative President Lee Myung-bak, captured the situation well.
"From the perspective of conservatives, Ahn is a better choice because he is like an empty canvass," Kim, now a professor at Sungkyunhwan University, said. "He doesn't have a fixed ideology or a crowd of people that influence him now."
Kim said that Moon has too much baggage that identifies him with Roh, who tried to break the country from the U.S. orbit and strived to strike an independent path. "This go-it-alone policy sounded fancy but was alienated from reality ― for Korea relies on its alliance with the U.S.," he said. "Without breaking the alliance, Roh's vision couldn't work."
In other words, Moon is an avatar of his former boss that the conservatives have a visceral dislike against. The irony is that it is a make-or-break disadvantage in an election that the conservatives still hold the key to despite their absence of a viable candidate.
Now, these conservatives are moving to Ahn on two hopes, enabling him to pull even with Moon. One such hope is that many of them feel confident that Ahn would be more accommodating to their ideas because of his background and general modus operandi, which are closer to conservative values than progressive approaches. In contrast, Moon is a closed book with his platform being anything but conservative.
Their second hope for Ahn also comes from their confidence that he would, if not divorce from, depart from the People's Party, the Jeolla-based party with progressive values, which split from Moon before he launched the Democratic Party of Korea with Roh's backers. To increase his appeal to the conservatives, Ahn vowed to persuade his party to reverse its party line of opposing the deployment of a U.S. Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), now a key campaign issue.
People's Party may follow Ahn's lead but there is a big question on how far the party's leadership can go for him, if he continues to accommodate the values of the rival Gyeongsang-based conservatives.
One interesting fact is that Moon's DPK and Ahn's People's Party by and large share the same roots.
For instance, President Kim Dae-jung's reconciliation approach toward North Korea is the key pillar of Ahn that was inherited by the succeeding Roh government and influenced its more positive initiative to achieve a greater Korea.
So far, Park Jie-won, the former People Party chief and chief of staff for Kim Dae-jung, has served as the glue, managing to keep Ahn's values and those of the party coexist. Conservatives think that Ahn and Park will part ways. Park is a highly skilled political operative who was once touted as the man who knew it before his boss made up his mind.
They see that the Ahn-Park union is part of political engineering with little chemistry involved.
So the chance is that if their union works until the election day, Ahn gets elected. Of course, that is if Ahn sustains the conservative support.
This is why experience may not be a deciding factor, despite all the hoopla about this election being about national security.
Oh Young-jin is The Korea Times' chief editorial writer. Contact foolsdie5@ktimes.com and foolsdie@gmail.com.
