By nearly all accounts, Barack Obama's trip abroad is a huge success. He got a view of the facts on the ground in Iraq, met with leaders in Afghanistan, and embraced our allies in Europe while stressing the need to re-engage in Afghanistan and secure the world's nuclear weapons. He brought over 200,000 Germans to unite in a chant of "USA! USA!"
Not a bad week.
Meanwhile, back in the states, John McCain engaged in self-parody at a German fudge store yesterday, desperately trying to get any, ANY criticism of Obama to stick.
First, McCain chided Obama for giving a campaign speech oversees one month after McCain gave a campaign speech overseas.
McCain's most recent spitball involved a canceled Obama campaign stop at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where the Dem nominee planned to visit injured troops. The campaign canned it, you see, because they felt it would be inappropriate to conduct such a visit as a campaign function
But McCain's so desperate, he went on the attack anyway.
"Barack Obama is wrong," McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers said in a statement yesterday. "It is never 'inappropriate' to visit our men and women in the military."
But it turns out the Pentagon itself advised Obama against the visit:
"We have longstanding Department of Defense policy in regards to political campaigns and elections," Pentagon spokesperson Elizabeth Hibner told me. "We informed the Obama staff that he was more than welcome to visit as Senator Obama, with Senate staff. However, he could not conduct the visit with campaign staff."After being told this, the Obama campaign announced yesterday that it had decided it was "inappropriate" to make the visit as part of a campaign trip.
There's a pattern here - McCain's campaign is getting lead around by the nose - across news cycle after news cycle.
The long-term result is a huge net-positive for Obama because the press core may become inoculated to such distractions. In normal circumstances, a bogus attack intended for distraction is considered successful if it lands its own story or news cycle before getting rebutted; it uses the 24-hour news frenzy to hang out there for a bit and clip your opponent's good press regardless of whether the attack is...true. But McCain's hits are duds - the sniping about Obama giving a campaign speech was contradicted with a description of McCain's own foreign campaign speech right in the same article. At the end of the day, reporters will start to wonder if McCain really has any message of his own - or any actual policy ideas that aren't "drill" and "victory" rhetoric. Perhaps they'll realize that McCain's actual policies on the war and the economy are unpopular, so he's avoiding them.
The Village even created a derogatory term for those in the traveling press relegated to following the McCain train-wreck: the "JV squad."
Update [2008-7-25 13:12:9 by Josh Orton]: McCain's campaign should learn to use Google.
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