Ich Bin Ein Obama

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 25, 2008 8:34 AM

There really wasn't much to object to in Barack Obama's Berlin speech yesterday, filled with high-flown language about tearing down walls and joining forces to pursue our "shared destiny," "save this planet" and "give our children back their future."

"The speech, frankly, could have been given by John McCain," NBC's Chuck Todd said. (Except maybe for the end-the-war part.)

A few too many cliches, perhaps. But then, the words weren't really the point. The point was the tableaux, the cheering crowd, the sense of a potential president repairing the Bushian breach with Europe and restoring America's global image.

You could see the television correspondents straining to find a note of skepticism-- maybe the folks back home are more worried about their mortgages--because what's the worst thing you can say about a well-delivered speech adored by the German masses? That he could have worn a better tie? That Ohio still has more electoral votes?

Let's zip through the MSM reporting and then I'll offer my take on the coverage of this World Tour.

NYT: "Senator Barack Obama stood before a sea of people here Thursday evening and issued a call for cooperation, imploring America and Europe to bridge differences and rekindle old alliances in an effort to restore global stability and better confront existing and unforeseen threats."

LAT: "In one of the most theatrical events of his campaign, Barack Obama called today for closer ties between Europe and the United States in a speech to more than 200,000 Germans at a towering monument to Prussian war triumphs."

WP: "Addressing a huge throng in the middle of this once-divided city, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Thursday implored Americans and Europeans to renew the partnership that once defeated communism to address 21st-century threats that he said put the security of all nations at risk."

Boston Globe: "Less than a mile from a point where the Berlin Wall once wound through this city's downtown, Senator Barack Obama yesterday extended his trademark message of unity to a global audience, inviting a large-scale collection of European supporters to join an era of liberal internationalism he said would be necessary to address the world's post-Cold War challenges."

Chicago Tribune: "Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama came to a city once divided by the Cold War and sustained in crisis by the Atlantic Alliance to call today for a strengthened commitment to international alliances for an era of new threats."

Now for a broader view:

After saying little in public during a weekend in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama met with traveling reporters near Jordan's Temple of Hercules, a gladiator standing his ground against the media hordes.

But even as the likes of NBC's Andrea Mitchell and ABC's Jake Tapper rose to press the Democratic candidate on Tuesday, television viewers back home heard nothing but faint voices in the wind. The journalists weren't miked; only Obama's answers came through loud and clear.

That may have been unintentional, but it underscored the degree to which Obama has controlled the message -- and, more important, the pictures -- during his exhaustively chronicled trek across the Middle East and Europe. Obama meeting the troops, meeting the generals, meeting prime ministers and kings, drawing a huge crowd in Berlin yesterday -- the images trump whatever journalists write and say.

In short, though Obamapalooza was not quite the lovefest that some expected, news outlets provided a spotlight so bright that their own people were left in the shadows.

"The pictures bring people into the story," says Jerry Rafshoon, who was President Jimmy Carter's media adviser. "In the television age, the more people who can see him in the role of commander in chief, the better it is for him." By contrast, Rafshoon says, when John McCain was seen riding around Kennebunkport in a golf cart with former president George H.W. Bush, "you're seeing him with his generation, the older generation. They looked like the past."

Dorrance Smith, President Bush's former Pentagon spokesman and a onetime ABC News producer, agreed that "the pictures have dominated. . . . In a campaign, that's as good as gold. The pictures would have broken through whether there was a one-camera pool or every anchor in the world."

Beyond the images, most journalists and pundits have depicted the trip as an unalloyed triumph. "A slam-dunk success," in the words of Time's Joe Klein; "a real grand slam," as Salon Editor Joan Walsh put it on "Hardball."

Obama became increasingly accessible as the week wore on. He held a second news conference in Israel, granted interviews to Time and Newsweek, and agreed to sit-downs through the weekend with CNN, Fox and "Meet the Press." Beyond that, he did something he rarely does: joking around with reporters on his plane.

Singling out New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd yesterday, Obama said: "What are you guys going to do in Berlin? Huh? Dowd? You got any big plans?"

He brushed aside a scribe's suggestion that he would attract "a million screaming Germans. Let's tamp down expectations here."

One reporter lowered the estimate to 900,000; another said, "Let's start a pool."

"We could!" Obama said.

While the scene looked cozy, the reporters asked substantive foreign-policy questions in more formal settings. And the three network anchors, whose presence came to symbolize complaints that the media were blanketing the trip as if it were a state visit, earned their paychecks.

CBS's Katie Couric repeatedly pressed Obama on why he wouldn't acknowledge the military success of Bush's surge in Iraq. ABC's Charlie Gibson asked about public sentiment that he's inexperienced and challenged him about changing his position on the status of Jerusalem, questioning whether that was a "rookie mistake." NBC's Brian Williams invoked a poll finding that a majority of Americans view him as the riskier choice for president. All three newscasts, whether out of guilt or a sense of fairness, also featured interviews with McCain.

All week, McCain was asked whether the media were favoring Obama. He deflected the question with the mantra: "It is what it is."

The loudly debated charge that news organizations are fawning over the Obama trip -- especially when contrasted with the meager attention paid to McCain's foreign travels -- seeped into the coverage itself.

"This has got to be very frustrating for John McCain . . . that he wants to make his points, he wants to get coverage, and yet everything seems to swarm around Barack Obama," Gibson told viewers. Couric, playing a clip from a McCain video mocking the media for swooning over the Illinois Democrat, questioned whether "the summer of love will continue."

There were some dust-ups. Some reporters complained about the lack of a press pool in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the military orchestrated all pictures and public statements (the Obama camp says the schedule was packed and the Pentagon was in charge, although he did squeeze in interviews with CBS's Lara Logan and ABC's Terry Moran). When the campaign pitched a background briefing in Jordan with aides who could not be identified, the correspondents balked, saying only the White House could get away with that.

Still, the tone of the coverage sometimes bordered on gushing, as in this Associated Press dispatch before the appearance in Berlin:

"In this city where John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all made famous speeches, Obama will find himself stepping into perhaps another iconic moment Thursday as his superstar charisma meets German adoration live in shadows of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. He then travels to Paris and London where he can expect to be greeted with similar adulation.

"It's not only Obama's youth, eloquence and energy that have stolen hearts across the Atlantic. . . . Obama has raised expectations of a chance for the nation to redeem itself."

A Rasmussen poll this week found that 49 percent of those surveyed expect the media to favor Obama this fall, while 14 percent expect favoritism toward McCain.

Not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass wrote of the coverage: "McCain is now cast as the crabby uncle who visits and shrieks there's no gin in your house," while Obama is "busy fighting off throngs of reporters, a cast of thousands as urgent and impassioned as in those old Hollywood biblical epics."

Ralph Begleiter, a former CNN correspondent who is now journalist in residence at the University of Delaware, says the notion that Obama was making real news -- as opposed to exploiting pretty backdrops -- is "a sham argument. Of course it's a photo op. If he wanted to go to Afghanistan as a senator he could have done it."

An unspoken assumption is that Obama, who enjoys a slight lead in the polls, is the odds-on favorite to win. In a forthcoming People cover story, a reporter asks the candidate and his wife, Michelle, about their daughters: "How are you preparing them for possible life in the White House?"

Some journalists defend the coverage as a matter of marketing: Obama is hot, McCain is not.

"The Obama phenomenon is so much the better story -- an obscure African American senator from Illinois, little known to most Americans two years ago, emerges as very probably the next president," says Terence Smith, a former correspondent for CBS and PBS. "That is a fantastic story. Of course it's going to get two or three times the space and attention and airtime of John McCain, who, while he may be a very appealing semi-maverick on his bus, is a much more conventional candidate."

By that standard, though, journalists can continue to lavish more coverage on Obama simply by declaring him a more fascinating guy.

Chris Wallace, host of "Fox News Sunday," says no one has to apologize for covering the "extraordinary" trip. And, he says, "there is no question in my mind there is more interest in Obama. It's the news business; you want to sell magazines. Some of it is flavor of the month. And there is some bias."

But overall, says Wallace, "I don't know that that's a good excuse. One would hope there would be rough parity in the coverage."

The power of stirring images was on display again yesterday in Berlin. Moments after finishing his speech at the Victory Column, as 200,000 Germans cheered, Obama strolled off with Brian Williams, camera crew in tow, to talk about what had just transpired.

Furthermore . . .

Hmm . . . check this out. Should we start a Hubris Watch after this Marc Ambinder post?

"With less than six months to go before he would be sworn in as the nation's 44th president, Sen. Barack Obama has directed his aides to begin planning for the transition.

" 'Barack is well aware of the complexity and the organizational challenge involved in the transition process and he has tasked s small group to begin thinking through the process,' a senior campaign adviser said. 'Barack has made his expectations clear about what he wants from such a process, how he wants it to move forward, and the establishment and execution of his timeline is proceeding apace.' "

Yes, it's good to be prepared. It's also July.

I've expressed a similar view myself, so I think Tom Bevan is onto something with this Real Clear Politics observation:

"The presidential race is in large part all about Obama and whether the country will accept-- his experience, his past associations, his policy prescriptions, and to a certain degree his race--or not.

"If he can seal the deal with the public, then he's likely to win--and it could be a very substantial victory. If he can't seal the deal, then he may very well lose -- and if things really go south and he loses the center badly to McCain, it could be a bigger defeat than most people can fathom at the moment.

"Many pundits, especially those on the left, have been confounded by the fact that for all the money, the enthusiasm, and the favorable political dynamics this year, Obama isn't further ahead in the polls. To the contrary, Obama's small but steady lead over McCain is evidence that he remains in a somewhat precarious position, and that some voters remain apprehensive or unsure about his candidacy."

Which is hardly surprising, given his recent arrival on the national scene.

Joe Klein sees a danger sign for the Democrat:

"Lots of speculation on the web, and in whispering circles, about why Obama's foreign trip--a slam-dunk success substantively and in photo-op terms (Obama laughing with Petraeus in the helicopter was the best)--hasn't resulted in a polling bump. The emerging conventional wisdom seems to be that the trip is a bit too grand, too . . . presumptuous and voters are wary of that. (And presumption, of course, always comes with the subterranean tinge of racism.) Maybe so.

"But I have another theory. People may be thinking, what on earth is Obama doing over there when we have so many problems back home? Why isn't he talking about the economy? No doubt, the Obama staff figured they needed this week abroad to establish the image of Obama as a potential commander-in-chief . . . and, no doubt, he will turn to the economy--a Democratic strength, according to the polls--when he gets home. But I wouldn't be surprised if Obama is paying a price for vamping about overseas while banks are cratering, gas prices soar and people are getting really, really nervous about their futures."

Does the McCain camp have a legitimate beef about the coverage? The New Republic's Michelle Cottle thinks the carping is pointless:

"My assumption is that McCain and his team are being shameless whiners about the media being more in love with Obama than with them in part because they're thinking it will help them with their base. (By God, if The New York Times hates him, he must be a good guy!)

"But since the media still play a key role in shaping the campaign narrative, presumably Team McCain would like to shame journalists into retooling their coverage and is thinking: Why not? It worked for Hillary! . . .

"But there seem to be a couple of differences here that could prove problematic for McCain:

"For starters, the media's abashed, late-in-the-game stab at rebalancing their coverage in the Hillary-Obama battle didn't result in any nicer press for Hillary. It simply prompted journalists to more closely scrutinize Obama and spotlight anything that smacked of a controversy, gaffe, or inconsistency. These days, however, Obama's every word and deed are already being deconstructed--far more so than McCain's. So surely Team McCain isn't suggesting that their guy is receiving harsher coverage. As for the (valid) complaint that Obama is the bigger media--not to mention cultural--phenom, I'm not sure what McCain expects media types to do about that: It was one thing for Hillary to gig journalists into paying more attention to the emerging rock star in this race. It seems unlikely McCain will shame the media into paying less attention to that now-even-bigger star . . .

"I'm not sure the best way for McCain to win more lovin' from journalists is to publicly mock, abuse, and insult them."

What? Just because he calls us "little jerks"?

And the latest on the Bob Novak accident: We hear from the 86-year-old homeless pedestrian who was hit.