It's no wonder that McCain and the Republicans are trying so unbelievably hard to discredit Obama as he travels to Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries around the world this weekend and next week. There has been a lot of talk about huge numbers of American troops wanting to wait in line for hours to greet Obama, and that he has received rock-star type attention among the troops. It's a sharp contrast to McCain's glum "meet and greets" when he's been over there. CNN had an interview with the mother of an American soldier who's currently in Afghanistan who said that her son's letters to her have been increasingly sadder and depressing as time has worn on (he's over there for a 3rd time) and she was very worried about his health but then she saw him in the background of CNN footage of Obama's trip and her son was smiling. The woman broke down during the interview and said she knew that her son had probably not smiled in months, and that Obama gave her son and the rest of the military some hope for the future. I thought that was very powerful. This is clearly the Republicans' worst nightmare so you know that the McBush spin machine is going to be working overtime for the next several days. Obama even played a game of pickup basketball with the troops. Can you imagine McCain ever doing that?

Lord, I don't even know where to start with this.

Media event. Move on.

Obama looks very 'presidential' on camera and in all the footage they're showing. McCain going on all the morning talk shows in an attempt to block coverage of it is kind of funny.

McCain on Good Morning America had a big gaffe when he was talking about the "Iraq-Pakistan border." There is no Iraq-Pakistan border. If Obama had said this, the Republican furor would be all over the news.

Agreed, Bill, but unfortunately one that forced the cancellation of three very important engagements in the red zone my team and I were to undertake with Iraqi colleagues today just so that security elements could support the junior senator from Illinois. It will take weeks to spin these missions up again, and will certainly delay implementation of some very important projects.

That said, the US Embassy was full of people, military and civilian, who wanted to see the man tonight. Like him or not, he does have charisma.

And FSU, I assume you were being rhetorical in your attempt to picture McCain playing a game of pick-up basketball--he has little mobility in his arms as the result of his captivity in Vietnam and couldn't do it if he wanted to.

I'm worried more about the "little mobility" left in McCain's brain these days, where every day there seems to be a new mistake, gaffe or lie.

Or how about Shrub and his agreement with Malaki for a "time horizon" regarding when the troops can finally come home. Careful now we can't admit to a TIMELINE.....Is that anything like an "event horizon"????? They(Shrub-McBush) both have brain rot as far as I am concerned.

For months, we have heard whining from McCain and the RNC about how Obama hasn't been to Iraq. Then when he actually goes, the trip is derided as a publicity stunt. Gotta love it.

The fact that McCain has been to Iraq hasn't affected his inability to distinguish Shiites from Sunnis, however.

Still, don't expect a neat withdrawal no matter who wins. The American Empire, though dying, slinks away slowly.

Maybe they just all have Obama-boners.

If he only sucks a few more Republicans out of the closet, this whole humongously expensive trip will have been worthwhile.

Saw vids of that initial greeting by the troops though. I have to admit that was pretty incredible.

Edit to add: There's something irksome about a guy running for president who goes overseas and has to say to a German audience " I love America." You would think that would be taken for granted for anyone other than Obama. But I suppose he felt he had to dampen the very mild critique of US policy that he made in the same speech. Hopefully that will not prevent him from letting justice take its course.

I about fell over this morning when Mc Cranky said he will wait until he's president before going to Germany. Um, Mc Cranky, it's going to be a looooooong wait then, may want to get that passport business out of the way now. Obama gave his usual stirring, excellent speech today. He is quite the gifted orator, and seems to be at least two steps ahead of Mc Cranky. Boy, I sure am glad Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" worked so well. I never thought I'd say this, but thanks, Rush! Due to your twisted, drug-adled ideas, you are handing the nation to Obama on a silver platter. Keep up the good work!

McCain practically forced Obama to go to Iraq and Afghanistan with his carping about Obama not having been there. So it was absurd for him to then complain about Obama going, and the press covering it. If you want to be covered by the press, make news-worthy appearances and memorable speeches. That said, the European leg of this trip strikes me as presumptuous. I don't recall Gordon Brown, Nicholas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel coming to Washington while they were candidates. That European tour is something I think should have waited until the transition period before the inauguration.

Also, I think Obama has run a very smart campaign, while McCain has stumbled and looked very unimpressive on occasion. Yet Obama has not pulled away. By all rights - with the economy in free-fall and Iraq still a quagmire - he should have a double-digit lead and be coasting. Yet the race remains close, and yesterday's polls show the race tightening more, and McCain pulling even or ahead in a couple of states that Obama rightfully thought he could convert to blue this time. My expectatation is still a narrow Obama victory, but I'm befuddled as to why it hasn't been - and looks like it won't be - easy.

Media Matters had a great take on all of these "new polls that showed the race tightening" yesterday. It was the McCain camp that picked which polls they wanted to read. Then they sent a campaign press release out yesterday citing those polls, and the mainstream media picked up on it and released the story perhaps because of laziness, or maybe just because they wanted to give McCain some good press. What wasn't released in that story yesterday was the new Pennsylvania poll that also came out yesterday, showing Obama increasing his lead in the Rasmussen Reports polling, going over 50% in PA for the first time, increasing his lead by 2% from the previous month. Also, Rasmussen had McCain leading Obama in PA as recently as May. Somehow this doesn't make yesterday's news.

Also yesterday, a national poll of Latinos came out and showed Obama now doing even better than Hillary was among Latinos. It also showed that while Bush won 40% of the national Latino vote in 2004, McCain is doing far worse among that group, getting only 23%, which if it holds, would virtually guarantee that Obama wins Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, traditionally red states. That is actually a much bigger story than the one the McCain camp - and in turn the mainstream media - released. Also not mentioned yesterday was Rasmussen's 4th consecutive poll in New Hampshire showing Obama in front by 4 or more points. New Hampshire was supposed to be McCain country.

Polls mean a little but not a lot at this stage but to pick and choose particular results to make one candidate look good when he's really trailing in most of the country is crazy. I think the under 40 crowd with only cell phones and no land lines is being hugely underestimated in polling. Are we really supposed to believe that traditionally blue Minnesota saw McCain gain 15% in polling in the last 3 weeks there? No chance. There's no way he went from 17 points down to 2 points down in a 3-week span. It was probably a 10-point lead all along and has remained there.

Also this just in... Gallup's daily tracking poll has just come out, and Obama has surged up 4 points overnight to a 6-point lead, the biggest one-day gain since they started tracking this presidential matchup. But wait, the McCain folks are telling us there is real tightening in the race, right?

the true audience of the Berlin speech was Americans, obviously.


NYT page 1 headline:

"Obama, Vague on Issues, Is a Crowd-Pleaser in Europe"


So it works there too!

I guess that's a better headline than:

"McCain Denies Another Gaffe While In Supermarket Cheese Aisle"

And you've got to love his backdrops and photo ops this week:

Oh Lordy Lordy. If the world and the U. S. have any chance of survival, McCain will be our next president. This Obama person will turn our nation into a pathetic wasteland. He is absolutely pure evil, evil evil.
He's over there talking to his muslim buddies right now. "The U.S. will be destroyed from within."
All the teeth and ears and arrogance I hope, will not persuade the intellegent public to fall for his type of, well, bullsh*t. This man should go no further up the political ladder. Otherwise this country is doomed.

The "intelligent public" understands that Obama is not a Muslim, nor evil.

New numbers are out today from Gallup. Obama continues to gain, now up by 9% and leading McCain 49-40%. It's a new benchmark for the biggest lead Obama has had over McCain in their polling. I bet we won't hear much about this poll from McCain and company, and I question whether the media will publicize this poll or not. I know it's in their best interest to tell everyone the race is too close to call.

Anyone who thinks that Iraq in July 2008 is a quagmire understands little to nothing about what is really happening on the ground here. But hey, what would I know?

Is this another of your weird "devil's advocate" posts or are you just being stupid?

YES! And as for the country being "doomed". You can thank Bush and friends for putting the economy, and everything else in the toilet.

The race is tight and will be tight down to the wire because Obama is a young (46), African-American, liberal Senator with a short national political track record. No matter how bad the economy gets, no matter how unpopular Bush and Cheney become, no matter how closely Obama's plans gibe with the needs and desires of majorities of Americans, a number will either not vote for him or will be wary of doing so based on the facts of who he is. There's just no getting around it.

I'd add that it's never easy for Democrats these days, though. Whether they're trying to replace bad Republicans (Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush) or decent Democratic predecessors (Bill Clinton), they face a hostile establishment media that parrots GOP talking points, and they run towards the center (right), usually disappointing their base, which also means a tight race. Carter didn't win by much, Clinton won only by pluralities (though the 1996 win was larger than 1992), and Gore won by a hair but still had the election stolen.

Right now Obama has leads in states that together give him close to 283 electoral votes. That is enough to win. The final tally may be closer or, if he holds these states and picks up a few more (like Nevada, Virginia, Montana, etc.), it could be a blowout. But the popular vote will be razor-thin, in part because of what I'm saying in paragraphs one and two above.

The tour was great politics and also had some substance. Nothing huge, but it definitely showed that Obama can look presidential, that he can interact in a statesmanlike manner with leaders of alied countries, that he has a grasp of how diplomacy works, that his popularity is not just a phantasm in his supporters' minds, and that, as Maliki's support for him in his statement on the timeline showed, his political vision is more sound than McCain's.

I think the Germany leg of the Obama tour was an enormous mistake. He ought to have held a smaller discussion about the future of US foreign policy and relations with Europe at a Berlin university in front of a crowd of, say, 1500 people (with an overflow crowd of 30,000 people outside). The image of a candidate speaking at a major landmark in a foreign country's capital in front of 200,000 people is just a bit too presumptuous and plays into McCain's strategy of portraying Obama as a rockstar and nothing more.

With the race tight now, Obama has to display more substance and less flash. And he needs (needs, needs, needs) some Democrats to become rabid attack dogs on McCain and anything he says. The GOP has its strategy down. The Dems now need to make McCain afraid to get out of bed each morning if they want to win this thing.

Wouldn't doing all that be a bit presumptive? He hasn't been officially chosen as the Democratic nominee yet. I'm sure the attack dogs will be out once it's official.

No. What is presumptive is setting up a public address in front of hundredds of thousands of foreign nationals in their national capital as though you are already head of state or some monarch. Obama would have been better served had his advisers steered him toward a university crowd where he could talk, as a US Senator, about his vision of the US and its relations with "old Europe" and our common interests. The way the public address played out gave McCain an enormous opening in that he could accuse Obama as being a self-aggrandizing egotist, as someone who is arrogant. Obama had better smarten up and check himself if he wants to win.

Totally agreed. I'm not even putting much into these national polls right now. They change way too much and the points you make about Obama are spot on. This is very new territory for this country and Obama's inexperience and race are just two factors that will hurt him. To what extend is what is yet to be determined. It is a change election, but this is a candidate like none we've ever seen before. So all of the little "the person with the 4th of July lead goes on to win in November" and the "the Halloween mask who sells the most wins" and all that blah blah blah totally goes out the window this year.

Barack Obama's pilfered message in the Western Wall reminds me of this exchange from Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest:

I thought of that when I read this allegation by a blogger that Barack Obama's prayer may not have been intended to be so secret after all.

However Cathleen Fusani, Religion Columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, has a far less cynical take on both the prayer and the man.

It is worth noting that in the quote from Wilde above Cecily thinks that Algernon is someone he is not.

Though I do not intend that metaphor for Obama the fact that many still feel that so is a thing he must battle.