Lee's first-year presser raises new doubts

Kim Seung-hyun

The author is an editorial writer at the JoongAng Ilbo. 

About two months after the launch of the Lee Jae Myung administration, former presidential AI policy secretary Ha Jung-woo offered an unusual description of the president.

“If you work under a ‘smart and hardworking’ leader, your teeth fall out,” he joked in a presidential office YouTube video from August 2025. Calling Lee “the boss [he] most wants to work for,” Ha praised him as a “smart and hardworking” leader, one of four leadership types commonly classified according to competence and diligence.

The point was meant as the highest compliment. A leader with exceptional ability and insight already pushes an organization forward. When that leader is also relentlessly hardworking, aides struggle to keep up. Woo Sang-ho, who won the Gangwon governorship in the June 3 local elections after serving as presidential secretary for political affairs, once remarked that working at the Blue House was so demanding that his “hair was falling out.”

After a year of the Lee administration, the public has a sense of what those aides meant. During presidential work briefings broadcast live on YouTube, viewers often saw senior officials sweating and stumbling through answers. Late-night text messages to aides and social media posts directed at the public became trademarks of a president known for getting things done.

From the perspective of citizens, such diligence can be appealing. A president who pushes bureaucrats around the clock and works aggressively and proactively appears to be a public servant doing his job. Lee’s repeated remark that “one hour of a public official’s time equals the combined hour of 52 million citizens” leaves few civil servants willing to argue.

But the determination to give everything and show everything to the public seemed absent at the president’s news conference marking his first year in office.

The sharp, pointed exchanges that frequently characterized his work briefings were largely missing. The most obvious example was the controversial issue of canceling indictments, which drew intense public attention after the local elections.

Lee acknowledged that the election results represented “a warning from the people.” But on the question of canceling indictments, he simply said that matters should be handled according to “law and common sense.” In effect, he returned the public’s question unanswered. Citizens asking why law and common sense were not being followed received the same phrase in response.

His references to political neutrality also seemed detached from reality. Given the current composition of the National Assembly, where establishing a genuinely neutral special counsel would be difficult, repeated appeals to neutrality sounded unconvincing. The administration appeared reluctant to address public concerns over unprecedented legislation that could allow the nation’s highest officeholder to benefit from canceled indictments.

The issue had become such a political black hole that the Democratic Party postponed debate on it until after the election. It may even have contributed to the defeat of Ha, who was widely viewed as one of Lee’s preferred candidates. Some analysts argue that conservative voters were mobilized after Lee told the acting prosecutor general at a Cabinet meeting the day before the election that mistakes should be acknowledged and corrected.

Against that backdrop, saying that improperly filed indictments should be corrected while proper ones should remain in place sounds evasive. A lawyer-president should have offered a more persuasive legal explanation.

Questions also surround Lee’s nomination of a Cabinet minister who owns four homes as prime minister. The decision appears inconsistent with his past rhetoric, including comparisons of multiple-home ownership to a social ill and comments suggesting even civil servants operating copy machines should not own multiple properties.

His casual discussion of property tax measures was equally striking. Lee once described such policies as the equivalent of a nuclear weapon in wartime, a last resort. But he introduced the subject with little acknowledgment of the contradiction.

These inconsistencies help explain why a news conference that ran well beyond its scheduled time still felt flat. Even Lee’s declaration that a president bears responsibility for everything, including whether it rains, seemed less convincing.

Before worrying about being blamed for droughts, the president should first answer citizens’ questions about the law and common sense. Otherwise, a leader once praised as smart and hardworking risks being seen as something quite different.