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Embraced Overseas, But to What Effect?
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But a Democrat who supported another candidate during the nomination battle had a more skeptical assessment of all the imagery. He argued that the Obama team is mistaken in believing that meetings with foreign leaders will help overcome a relatively thin résumé in foreign affairs.
"It's not whether he has experience or is presidential; it's whether voters can relate to him, given his unusual background and his often seeming arrogance. Talking to Germans and having Sarkozy embrace you make this problem worse, not better. If I were the RNC [Republican National Committee], I'd use the German-language Obama flier in an ad to make him appear more foreign, more distant."
The trip went smoothly save for one flap with the Pentagon over a planned visit by Obama to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Pentagon officials raised concerns about campaign aspects of the visit, and Obama's team scrubbed it, then tried to explain what they had been told that forced them to back away.
Looking for an opening, McCain accused Obama in a new ad of "going to the gym" while in Germany instead of visiting the wounded troops, and of doing so because the hospitals would not let television cameras film the event.
McCain said in an interview to be aired Sunday morning on ABC's "This Week" program that "if I had been told by the Pentagon that I couldn't visit those troops, and I was there and wanted to be there, I guarantee you, there would have been a seismic event," according to the Associated Press.
Substantively, the trip left questions for Obama. He struggled to square his opposition to the troop buildup in Iraq with the successes he witnessed and talked about. Obama initially said the buildup might even increase violence. Now that it has helped produce the opposite, McCain, rather than Obama, can claim he had superior judgment.
His willingness to pledge to make the Middle East one of his administration's top priorities leaves open how he can fulfill that promise, given the urgency he would face as president to deal with the economy and with all the potential complications of drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq and augmenting them in Afghanistan.
He went to countries to offer reassurances, but as he noted Saturday morning at his news conference, in answer to a question about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's political troubles, the realities of governing are different. "I will tell you that you are always more popular before you are actually in charge of things," he said. "And then, you know, once you are responsible, then you are going to make some people unhappy."
