Posted by
InchDeep on Saturday, July 26, 2008 11:31:31 PM
The Obama world tour was bust. It showed how unprepared he is for the big time job of being the president. To bad McCain was unable to take advantage of that fact. If McCain wins in the fall it will be due to the American peoples uncertainty about Obama is greater than their love for McCain. They will feel, out of the two choices, McCain will do the least damage to the country.
The media is gaga over Barack Obama’s international trip. They fawn,
they cheer, and they marvel. But did they miss the big story? It
wouldn’t be the first time in this (or a prior) election in which the
MSM collectively missed the boat. And this time, it happened largely at
the hands of some reporters who gave Obama just enough room to do
himself some damage.
As Michael Dukakis’ former campaign manager Susan Estrich
observed, “[B]eing the favorite of the press doesn’t necessarily win
you votes.” And sometimes they lull you into a state of bliss, unaware
that the sheer excess of their infatuation is itself problematic.
There are several legacies of the Obama trip that will linger long
after the pictures fade from memory. Unfortunately for him (and his
media cheerleaders), none is positive.
First, he put himself, with a bit of help from interviewers Charlie Gibson, Terry Moran, and Katie Couric,
in an awful ideological bind. The surge has worked despite Obama’s
predictions. Indeed, his trip helped publicize just how startling has
been the transition in Iraq from chaos to fledgling democracy. Rather
than join the victory celebration he continued to declare his
opposition to the surge and bemoan that the money wasn’t used on
domestic spending (or alternatively in Afghanistan, where the same
enemy lurks and Obama suggests we employ the very same surge concept).
Each of the interviewers, to one degree or another, expressed
incredulity and frustration. Why wouldn’t he concede the surge had worked and he was wrong? It is, after all, not everyday that a presidential candidate says he still
believes we shouldn’t have pursued a path to victory. It would have
been as if Thomas Dewey in the 1944 presidential race declared that we
never should have attempted D-day.
This will be an ongoing and serious dilemma for Obama. It raises
issues of judgment and stubbornness — the very issues on which John
McCain has tried to get traction. How will he explain that he’s sorry
we made the effort to win in Iraq –or believed we could have
miraculously arrived at the same outcome with no military effort? It
will not be easy and it raises anew the question as to whether a glib,
inexperienced senator appreciates the implications of military defeat —
or potential victory. McCain will no doubt make this a central focus of
his argument that Obama is unfit to lead.
The second impact of the trip stems from Obama’s mistake in assuming
international acclaim and media adoration would impress the folks back
home. Watching tens of thousands of Germans listen to his worldly
appeal that “this is our [who is “our” exactly?] time,” voters back home may not be impressed. And poll numbers
suggest they aren’t. The blatant appeal to international world opinion
(why exactly was he giving a campaign speech to tens of thousands of
non-voting Europeans?) may not be the recipe for success.
McCain certainly spotted the opening. His attempt to focus on energy
policy and counterprogram Obama’s overseas speech with appearances in
key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania showed the McCain team suspects
voters may be turned off by Obama’s wooing of international public
opinion. A McCain campaign statement summed up the problem for Obama:
“While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of
Berlin, proclaiming himself a ‘citizen of the world,’ John McCain
continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide
this election. Barack Obama offered eloquent praise for this country,
but the contrast is clear. John McCain has dedicated his life to
serving, improving and protecting America. Barack Obama spent an
afternoon talking about it.”
And finally, Obama’s mega-gaffe in snubbing the wounded troops
in Germany (with the excuse he wouldn’t want to use campaign funds for
such a visit) left even the MSM scratching their heads. There could be
no perfect example of the argument McCain has been making: this is a
callow man whose ego blinds him to the sacrifice of military service.
Coming on the heels of news that Obama is already planning his White House transition, it seemed to put new emphasis on the question the McCain camp has been implicitly asking, “Who does he think he is?”
So Obama has left a trail of political presents for McCain to scoop
up. It should not be surprising that the mainstream press fails to
recognize that the seeds of Obama’s undoing may have been sown under
their very noses. They didn’t initially recognize the impact of Reverend Wright either. And the left-leaning punditocracy threw a collective fit when ABC moderators asked hard questions of Obama, which later proved to be key consideration for many primary voters in Rust Belt states.
The elite liberal pundits and reporters are, after all, exceedingly
poor gauges of public opinion on everything from the appeal of Ronald
Reagan to abortion politics. So it would not be unusual to find that
they missed the real story (or chose to shield their eyes from it). The
desperation to help elect their chosen son has blinded them to the
implications of his and their own behavior. And the beneficiary of that
is John McCain.
Can McCain capitalize on it? Polls
show he is narrowing the gap with Obama as McCain concentrates on
national security and energy policy (where Obama has embraced a
position utterly at odds with three-quarters of the voters). With laser-like focus, he now must make the argument that the Obama summer abroad proves his (and Hillary Clinton’s)
point: Obama does not pass the commander-in-chief test. And if he is
successful, the political pundit class will look back on Obama’s week
abroad and marvel how they got it so wrong. But they usually do.
Jennifer Rubin is PJM's Washington, D.C. editor. She also blogs at Commentary’s Contentions.