Newsweek Blogs

Fineman: A Plan to Swing Colorado

Andrew Romano — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:01:51 GMT

As we've noted before on this blog, if Barack Obama turns any big red state blue this year, it's probably going to be Colorado. Even though Bush won there by eight percent in 2000 and five percent in 2004, Obama has led McCain--with one exception--in every poll taken since the start of the year; the prediction whizzes at FiveThirtyEight.com give him a 55 percent chance of victory. In the past, we cited Obama's strong performance in the caucuses and the state's increasingly affluent, liberal, suburban population as the reasons why the Illinois senator could score an upset. But there's one factor we overlooked: organization. Here, NEWSWEEK's Howard Fineman reveals how Obama plans to use the Democratic Convention in Denver as an opportunity to train and turn out the troops:

The Obama campaign is a state-of-the-art combination of aura and organization. The band is fronted by a glamorous lead singer who lures the crowds but is backed by roadies who pay meticulous attention to digital, Net-based and street-level detail.

So while the candidate is making headlines worldwide, his campaign planners back in the Loop in Chicago are busy with the less glitzy work but no less important work: planning innovative ways to use the August convention in Denver as a grass-roots organizing tool.

One part of the plan is to boost the campaign in Colorado. For the first time in decades, the Democrats are meeting in a true Electoral College swing state, and the Obama campaign wants to make the most of a rare opportunity. "One one level, the convention is all about Colorado," said a top Democratic Party official, who did not wanted to be quoted commenting on what is technically a separate operation. They have a challenge in front of them: a new Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters has John McCain leading Obama in Colorado by 2 points (46 percent to 44 percent); a month ago, Obama led 49 percent to 44 percent.

Colorado's status—and Obama's love of rock-star settings—is the reason why Obama will use the city's football stadium as the site for his acceptance of the nomination on the convention's last night. An estimated 80,000 will attend, and the campaign is using the scramble for tickets as a way to harvest names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers for Coloradoans who might not otherwise get involved. "They could ID an extra twenty or thirty thousand people," the official said. "If they are willing to come out and see him, they might be willing to make calls for him."

There will be a parallel, focused effort aimed at the delegates. Rather than view them merely as personages to be wined and dined, the Obama campaign wants to use their presence in Denver as a training opportunity—to teach organizing for in the fall.

This would seem to be another obvious idea, but, in fact, it hasn't been done to any great extent before. Delegates tend to be treated as accidentally prominent game-show winners, there for one purpose only: to vote the way the primary and caucus voters told them to. It's emblematic of the Obama approach that his campaign wants them to be and do more.

Many of Obama's own delegates already knew the key people and methods of Obama's Facebook-founded campaign, but the vast collection of Hillary Clinton delegates who will be in Denver don't. While they munch on brightly hued vegetables (the party has famously insisted that caterers supply a range of green, red and yellow food), they will learn.

READ THE REST HERE.

Ich Bin Ein [Insert Noun Here]

Andrew Romano — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:29:24 GMT

AP Photo/Markus Schreiber

Here at NEWSWEEK, we're used to reporting on trends. But now it seems we've started one. Last Friday, my colleague Michael Hirsh wrote a column previewing Barack Obama's overseas trip, calling it his "ich bin ein commander" test in a reference to John F. Kennedy's famous 1963 "Ich Bin Ein Berliner" speech in Berlin. Web editor Arlene Getz liked the phrase so much that she promoted it from the second sentence to the headline. The rest, as they say, is history.

July 18: "Ich Bin Ein Commander," Michael Hirsh, Newsweek

July 19: "Ich Bin Ein Jet-Setter" by Maureen Dowd, New York Times

July 24: "Ich Bin Ein Amerikaner" by Marty Kaplan, Huffington Post

July 24: "Ich Bin Ein Obama" by Reid Wilson, RealClear Politics

July 24: "Ich Bin Ein Barack" by Jess Smee, The Guardian

July 24: "Ich Bin Ein Obama Superfan" by KCRG, Iowa

July 24: "Ich Bin Ein Hypocrite" by the Republican National Committee

July 24: "Ich Bin Ein Ohioan" by Katherine Marsh, The New Republic

July 24: "Ich Bin Ein Power Elitist" by Lew Rockwell, LewRockwell.com

July 25: "Ich Bin Ein Obama" by Howard Kurtz, Washington Post

July 25: "Ich Bin Ein Defeatist" by Stephan Andrew Brodhead, The Conservative Voice

We hear that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In which case, consider us flattered.

That said, Obama has already left Germany for France. "Obama? He's my pal," President Nicholas Sarkozy told Le Figaro yesterday. "Unlike my diplomatic advisors, I never believed in Hillary Clinton's chances. I always said that Obama would be nominated." What familiar French phrase will the headline writers of America use to capture that certain je-ne-sais-quoi of Obama's tête-à-tête with Sarkozy and the esprit de corps and/or joie de vivre it inspires in his claque of foreign admirers? Will Obama find the mot juste? Or will he commit a faux pas? Will his visit be a tour de force? Or will the French conclude that he's a naïf, an ingénu, an arriviste? Also, what's the soup du jour?

UPDATE, 11:30: Zut alors! It seems the eagle-eyed Rachel Sklar spotted the "Ich Bin Ein" headline craze before I did. C'est la vie blogger.

The Filter: July 25, 2008

Andrew Romano — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:07:53 GMT

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

PLAYING INNOCENT ABROAD
(David Brooks, New York Times)
When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign. But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more... In Berlin, Obama made exactly one point with which it was possible to disagree. In the best paragraph of the speech, Obama called on Germans to send more troops to Afghanistan... Much of the rest of the speech fed the illusion that we could solve our problems if only people mystically come together. We should help Israelis and Palestinians unite. We should unite to prevent genocide in Darfur. We should unite so the Iranians won’t develop nukes... The odd thing is that Obama doesn’t really think this way. When he gets down to specific cases, he can be hard-headed. Last year, he spoke about his affinity for Reinhold Niebuhr, and their shared awareness that history is tragic and ironic and every political choice is tainted in some way. But he has grown accustomed to putting on this sort of saccharine show for the rock concert masses, and in Berlin his act jumped the shark. His words drift far from reality, and not only when talking about the Senate Banking Committee. His Berlin Victory Column treacle would have made Niebuhr sick to his stomach. Obama has benefited from a week of good images. But substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.

OBAMA'S PATH TO THE PRESIDENCY IS FAR FROM CLEAR
(Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times)
Even as his turn on the global stage hit an emotional peak Thursday with a speech before a cheering crowd of more than 200,000 in Germany, Barack Obama faced new evidence of stubborn election challenges back home. Fresh polls show that he has been unable to convert weeks of extensive media coverage into a widened lead. And some prominent Democrats whose support could boost his campaign are still not enthusiastic about his candidacy. Several new surveys show that Obama is in a tight race or even losing ground to Republican John McCain, both nationally and in two important swing states, Colorado and Minnesota. One new poll offered a possible explanation for his troubles: A minority of voters see Obama as a familiar figure with whom they can identify. Republicans are moving to exploit this vulnerability, trying to encourage unease among voters by building the impression that Obama's overseas trip and other actions show he has a sense of entitlement that suggests he believes the White House is already his.

OBAMA, VAGUE ON ISSUES, PLEASES CROWD IN EUROPE
(Steven Erlanger, New York Times)
For Senator Barack Obama, who came to Europe once in the last four years, making a stop in London on his way to Russia, the response of many Europeans to his potential presidency has been gratifying — emotional, responsive, replete with the sense of hope he seeks to engender about a more flexible, less ideological America. European governments and politicians are not so sure. On Thursday evening in a glittering Berlin, Mr. Obama delivered a tone poem to American and European ideals and shared history. But he was vague on crucial issues of trade, defense and foreign policy that currently divide Washington from Europe and are likely to continue to do so even if he becomes president — issues ranging from Russia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to new refueling tankers and chlorinated chickens, the focus of an 11-year European ban on American poultry imports.

NO. 44 HAS SPOKEN
(Gerhard Spörl, Der Spiegel)
It was a ton to absorb -- and what a stupendous ride through world history: the story of his own family, the Berlin Airlift, terrorists, poorly secured nuclear material, the polar caps, World War II, America's errors, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, freedom. It's amazing anyone could pack such a potpourri of issues into the space of a speech that lasted less than 30 minutes. So what sticks? That Barack Obama is a passionate politician who is fixated on -- and takes very seriously -- his desire for a better world. That he is an impressive speaker who knows how to casually draw his audience into his image of the world -- one who doesn't have any need to resort to the kind of cheap effects that tend to prompt the uproarious applause of an audience. That he is a typical American -- an idealist in the true spirit of the American success story who is now very casually making his claim to becoming something akin to the president of the world... Europe is witnessing the 44th president of the United States during this trip. Anyone who listens to him realizes that he is not only ambitious but will also make demands. In the inner circles of Angela Merkel's Chancellery, he is reportedly seen as a pleasant person, one who arouses curiosity. However, he is also certain to demand the help of the Germans, Brits and French in Afghanistan and Iraq. He's not going to let NATO shirk its duty -- and therein lie the perils of the engaging "we" and the catchy "Yes, we can." Otherwise all these hard-nosed Europeans will hope and pray that the future President Obama isn’t really all that serious about the saving the world of tomorrow, the polar caps, Darfur and the poppy harvest over in Afghanistan.

OBAMA ABROAD: WE GET THE PICTURE
(Howard Kurtz, Washington Post)
After saying little in public during a weekend in Iraq and Afghanistan, Barack 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.

HEY OBAMA: THERE'S BRATWURST IN OHIO TOO (BUT NO CHEERING MASSES)
(Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times)
Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign recovered from a near-death experience almost exactly a year ago, and political candidates stumble in and out of troughs all the time. But it is safe to say that Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is not having a spectacular week. As his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, met one-on-one with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the Middle East on Wednesday, Mr. McCain went on an awkward grocery-shopping trip with a mother and two children in a Pennsylvania supermarket and held a news conference at the dairy case. And as Mr. Obama spoke to a rousing crowd of more than 200,000 in Berlin on Thursday, Mr. McCain had a bratwurst lunch with the owner of a car dealership and other local business people at a German restaurant in Columbus... Campaign advisers to Mr. McCain say that the mood is not good at headquarters in Arlington, Va., and that the week got off to a bad start when Mr. McCain was photographed in a golf cart with the 84-year-old former President George Bush in the resort town of Kennebunkport, Me. It was the same day that pictures of Mr. Obama in sleek sunglasses alongside Gen. David H. Petraeus in a helicopter in Iraq were beamed all over the world. But Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Thursday over his own bratwurst lunch that he, for one, was not alarmed, and that Mr. McCain had spent the week in battleground states meeting with people who actually vote in American elections. “I think he’s getting his message out — go look at some of the local press and the local TV packages,” Mr. Salter said. “It’s John McCain on energy and the economy.”

MCCAIN MAY ACT SOON ON VP PICK
(Michael D. Shear and Robert Barnes, Washington Post)
Anxious to counter the blanket media coverage that has followed Sen. Barack Obama on his overseas journey, Sen. John McCain is weighing whether to announce his running mate in the coming weeks before the spotlight shifts to China and the opening of the Olympic Games next month. "He's in a position to make [the decision] on short notice if he wanted to," said Charles R. Black Jr., one of McCain's top political advisers. Two top aides to the presumptive Republican nominee said the decision is likely to be announced after Obama returns from Europe on Sunday and before the Beijing Olympics begin Aug. 8. They said the campaign fears that unanticipated events coming out of China -- whether in the form of athletic accomplishments or human rights protests -- could deflect attention from the announcement if it were made during the Games... The list of likely contenders includes former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former U.S. budget director Rob Portman and former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge.

MCCAIN STRUGGLES TO OVERCOME ECONOMY GAP
(David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
Uncertain economic times have returned Americans to a pre-Sept. 11 mindset, according to recent polling, placing John McCain at a disadvantage on pocketbook issues reminiscent of the failed presidential reelection campaigns of George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. At a time when American financial insecurity is at record levels and national security issues have taken a backseat to economic worries, McCain’s Washington experience has failed to convince voters that he is more qualified to handle the economy. Only 31 percent of Americans say McCain is the candidate “better able to improve economic conditions,” according to a recent CBS/New York Times Poll, compared to 51 percent for Obama. That lead has held stable for months. Obama is even seen as being better “able to deal with taxes”—traditionally a winning issue for Republicans—by a 47 to 36 percent margin. One month earlier, voters preferred McCain on the tax issue, 44 to 39 percent. “They are in trouble,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said of the McCain campaign. “The structure of the election works against the Republican party at all levels,” he added, emphasizing the economy first. Indeed, as recently as November 2007, twice as many voters said the war in Iraq, rather than the economy, was their chief concern, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Today, Pew finds that concern over the economy is double the level of the war in Iraq, 44 percent to 19 percent. Over the same period, the portion of Americans most worried over gas prices rose more than eight-fold, from 2 percent last November to 17 percent by summer.

MALIKI VOTES FOR OBAMA
(Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post)
Maliki believes that his armed forces are strong enough to sustain the new Iraq with minimal U.S. help. He may be overconfident, as he has been repeatedly in estimating his army's capacities, most recently in launching a somewhat premature attack on militias in Basra that ultimately required U.S. and British support to succeed. And he is certainly more confident of his own capacities than is Gen. David Petraeus. Whether warranted or not, Maliki's very confidence allows him to set out a rapid timetable for U.S. withdrawal, albeit conditioned on continuing improvement in the security situation -- a caveat Obama generally omits. But Maliki calculates that no U.S. president, whatever his campaign promises, would be insane enough to lose Iraq after all that has been gained and then be saddled with a newly chaotic Iraq that would poison his presidency. So Maliki is looking ahead, beyond the withdrawal of major U.S. combat forces, and toward the next stage: the long-term relationship between America and Iraq. With whom does he prefer to negotiate the status-of-forces agreement that will not be concluded during the Bush administration? Obama or McCain?

OBAMA, MCCAIN SEEK DEMOGRAPHIC FORCE LIKE CLINTON'S SOCCER MOMS
(Catherine Dodge, Bloomberg News)
Political strategists and pollsters are on the hunt for the "soccer moms'' and "Nascar dads'' of 2008, the blocs of swing voters with enough clout to turn the tide in the presidential race. Pollsters haven't yet popularized catchy labels for key demographic groups, like the minivan-driving suburban "soccer moms'' deemed crucial in 1996. There is one group that's up for grabs and could swing the election to Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain: women in their 50s and 60s without a college education. "These women tend to be security oriented, in the broadest sense,'' said Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster. "They don't want a risky choice.'' Those attitudes present a challenge for Obama, he said. Because the same women are "hard-pressed economically,'' however, Garin said they may be receptive to the Democrat's campaign. "They're the ones managing the food budget, paying the health-care bills,'' Garin said. Heading into the fall campaign, McCain held a 42-39 percent lead among non-college educated white woman, between 50 and 69 years old, in a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll last month... [But] if the economy remains the central issue by Election Day, "you have to believe Obama has an advantage,'' said Chris Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Allentown, Pennsylvania. "If the security issue reemerges as more potent, that will of course help McCain.''

WORKINGMAN'S BLUES
(The Economist)
Joel and Jackie Brende differ on many things. He’s a Republican, and thrilled to have just shaken John McCain’s hand at a town-hall meeting in Kansas City, Missouri. She’s a Democrat, who supports Barack Obama because she thinks it is “time for a change”. But both of them agree that America’s star is fading. “We were always optimistic when we were young. We thought that every year, things would get better,” says Mrs Brende. But now: “The bubble has burst. I think my generation [will be] the last to see a great America.”...Asked about their own lives, however, the Brendes are rather more cheerful. “We’re OK, financially,” says Mrs Brende. She is a travel writer; her husband is a doctor. They live half the year in Missouri and half in Mexico. They have 24 grandchildren and another on the way. Life could be a lot worse. Regardless of their political beliefs, American voters are in a horrible mood this year. Democrats are sick of George Bush. Republicans are sick of the Democrats running Congress. Everyone worries about Iraq, either because they think the war should never have been fought, or because of the long, costly and thankless slog it has turned into. The latest violence in Afghanistan is depressing. The culture war grinds on: America is slouching towards Gomorrah or theocracy, depending on your viewpoint. The earth is either cooking or being overrun by eco-fanatics. And the American economy is tottering. The polls tell a dismal tale. Only 29% of Americans approve of the president. Only 14% approve of Congress. And just 6% view the economy positively. Yet many Americans combine despondency about the big picture with personal contentment. More than 80% say they are satisfied with their own circumstances. Even more are satisfied with their jobs. And although nearly everyone despises Congress, most Americans like their own representatives. How to reconcile those stark contradictions?

Can the Tour De France Outrun Doping?

Newsweek — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:38:26 GMT

NEWSWEEK's Lily Huang writes on this year's Tour de France:

A year ago the Tour de France disintegrated before it left the Alps. The presumptive winner, Michael Rasmussen, fired by his team for evading doping controls during training, lost the yellow jersey before he could finish. (Floyd Landis, who tested positive post-race in 2006 for testosterone boosts, gave up his title in a courtroom.). This year, the Tour is implementing a real crackdown on substance abuse--so far, three riders have been kicked out of the race--and fending off its troubled recent history with some serious rebranding.

Take a look at the poster that Tour organizers have heavily used to promote the event: Front and center is a heart, tattooed onto a stretch of pavement. Inside is the inscription “Le Tour Toujours”--the Tour forever. The symbolism mimics the silent encouragement that devoted fans like to write in spray paint on mountain roads to lift the pedals of their favorite riders. The inscription makes this Tour sound like a return to some enduring essence, as though the steady purging of compromised riders over the last two years was but a nightmarish interlude.

The most extravagant bike race on earth used to be the story of men against impossibility: Charly Gaul versus the storm, Tom Simpson versus the Continentals, Marco Pantani versus the world. Now the Tour is about itself, versus drugs. Dogged by drug scandals for the last ten years, the Tour has to prove that it can recover, and still create a story that will go down in the annals of the sport. This year’s race rolled out under a new banner, but the worst hallmarks of the old--drugs, lies, and sensationalist journalism--have yet to be dropped.

Along with the general paranoia of recurring scandal is a deepening distrust of whoever is wearing the leader's yellow jersey. Last year's eventual champion, Alberto Contador, was not allowed to compete in this year's race; he and the rest of Lance Armstrong’s former team had signed with the Kazakh conglomerate sponsor Astana, which Tour organizers decided to penalize for previous doping offenses, notably involving Alexandre Vinokourov in 2007 but none of the current members. With that, the Tour organizers hope, the message is clear: we’re back, and we’re drug-free.

So far this year, three riders have been eliminated for drug-related offenses: Manuel "Triki" Beltrán, the veteran Spaniard riding for Liquigas; Moisés Dueñas Nevado of Barloworld, who just cost his young team their sponsorship by breaking the sponsor’s zero-tolerance policy; and Riccardo Riccò, whose high-profile detention prompted the entire Saunier Duval team to a hasty withdrawal from the race. All three tested positive for EPO (erythropoletin), a hormone that stimulates production of red blood cells, but Riccò was found to have used a "third-generation" strain of the drug. Unfortunately for Riccò, the World Anti-Doping Agency already knew about it and had developed a third-generation test.

In the old Tour, nobody talked about drugs. In the not-so-old Tour, the mid- to late '90s, the original heyday of EPO, guys like Christophe Moreau, Frankie Andreu and David Millar confessed to drug use and opened the first fissures in cycling’s insular culture. In the new Tour, Millar is a leader of Garmin-Chipotle, the poster team for clean cycling, which he calls "the future of the sport." This year, the peloton has undergone some 3,000 doping controls, compared to 300 in 2006, according to Team Columbia manager Bob Stapleton. Retribution is swift and total for any rider guilty of transgression: handcuffs, police custody, a possible prison sentence for possession of illegal substances.

The image of Triki Beltrán, a rider who did three Tours of duty for Lance Armstrong, partially obscured in the back of a police car is a reminder of just how the Tour has gone about renouncing its former self. Phasing out drugs is noble and necessary, better for the riders and better for the sport. But the Tour seems unable to make the transition without also making spectacle out of the riders’ disgrace. Each of the indicted riders this year quit the Tour under a formidable police escort and may be sentenced to at least two, and up to five, years in prison. The 24-year-old Riccò, like his compatriot Cristian Moreni, who was hauled off the 2007 Tour, has already had to spend the night in jail.

Complicit in this portrayal of doped riders as moral degenerates and menaces to society are the journalists who cover the Tour. For the mainstream press the spectacle easily takes precedence over the sport, and the idea of a guy taking a bike around France over mountain passes that only weeks ago were buried in snow does not register as inherently fantastical. The Los Angeles Times has already wondered if this year’s race might be another “Tour de Dope.” The 2007 Tour’s frenzied witch hunt was fed in no small part by Le Monde, the French daily, flush with suspicion of the new yellow jersey.

Whatever the depth of corruption in the sport, from the 1998 Festina Affair to the 2006 Operación Puerto, the two greatest drug busts in the history of cycling, the riders remain the most visible accomplices. (The preeminent Festina team rocked the entire sport when customs officials stopped a team car loaded with dope, syringes, and other paraphernalia. Operación Puerto uncovered the dealings of Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes with dozens of top cyclists, after a raid of his collection of doctored blood.) These two events transformed the Tour not by exposing the underside of the professional peloton but by revealing a deeper truth: that no outsider knows what goes into the Tour. Suddenly, general understanding of the sport became contingent upon a single unanswerable question: do they or don't they? This is where the old Tour lies abandoned--the Tour of Coppi and Bobet, Anquetil and Poulidor, Hinault and LeMond, Armstrong and Ullrich--replaced by one less concerned with the stories of its riders than the campaign against dope.

The scuffling of the last ten years has cost the Tour dearly. As the race nears its end, what matters is not whether the anti-doping authorities will catch every scofflaw but whether the Tour will maintain its own narrative as one of the world's premier athletic events. That story is still one for the ages. The Tour won't be itself until Lance Armstrong has a true successor--someone who wins and keeps yellow, and returns to defend it. Until then, the advances in drug screening can keep the show on the road, but the heart of the race will keep bleeding on the asphalt.

The Berlin Effect

Andrew Romano — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:33:46 GMT

Sauerkraut, anyone? Today, more than 200,000 Germans----nearly triple the size of his largest U.S. crowd to date--gathered between Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and Siegessäule to hear Barack Obama speak. Meanwhile, John McCain was 4,339 miles away at Schmidt's Sausage Haus in Columbus, Ohio, where he greeted a handful of diners and downed some bratwurst with his pal Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

So who had the better afternoon?

The answer's not as obvious as the images--or the gushing cable coverage--might imply. To see why, it's helpful to divide Obama's actual audience--not the Teutons in attendance, but his countrymen back home--into three psychographic groups. The first two have already decided whom they're voting for. On the right, there are those who see Obama's unprecedented overseas adventure as unforgivably presumptuous--part of a pattern extending from last month's faux-presidential seal to the report today that he's directed his aides to begin planning for his White House transition. For them, the centerpiece of Obama's Berlin speech--"tonight, I speak to you... as a fellow citizen of the world"--will sound "a little too post-nationalist," or, put another way, not sufficiently "American." On the left, meanwhile, there are the folks who consider Obama's Kenya-to-Kansas persona the perfect antidote to President Bush's patented brand of "cowboy diplomacy." For these globally conscious voters, watching the Democratic nominee's Berlin rally--with its sea of adoring foreigners holding hundreds of American flags--was like glimpsing planet earth's utopian future. The first group--which has shrunk since John Kerry was declared "too French" in 2004--is voting for McCain; the second--which has grown--is voting for Obama. Berlin merely reinforced these preferences.

The real political target of the senator's speech--which was appropriately eloquent and appropriately safe--was somewhere in between. Today, 75 percent of U.S. citizens believe that Bush's foreign policy is to blame for anti-American sentiment overseas, and 70 percent disapprove of his performance as president; only 46 percent, on average, support Obama. In other words, 25 to 30 percent of the electorate is disgusted with Bush--especially on international affairs--yet still not sold on the Democratic nominee. That's group number three. In the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 55 percent of voters said Obama would be the riskier choice for president, and a mere 25 percent said he'd make a better commander in chief. These people agree that Obama would help restore America's reputation abroad. But they're still not sure he's ready for office. The point of Obama's globetrotting performance this week, then, was to lower his risk factor and raise his commander-in-chief cred by giving these swing voters a chance to picture him as POTUS. I'm ready to meet with the Merkels and Malikis and restore our international reputation, he's saying. You know how you can tell? I'm already doing it. Figure out how many anti-Bush Obama skeptics were swayed by the senator's seven days of exhaustively choreographed photo-ops--at the Western Wall, with Maliki, in Gen. Petraeus's chopper--and you'll know how successful his tour really was. Given their skepticism, I can't imagine the number is earth-shattering. That's not to say the trip wasn't a worthwhile experience for Obama and an inspiring vision for many Americans. It undoubtedly was. It's just that the domestic political benefits probably aren't as large as Chris Matthews and Co. are making them out to be.

In fact, there's reason to believe that it's McCain, not Obama, who's made up the most ground in recent days--especially in key swing states. According to the latest American Research Group polls, Obama now trails by two points in Florida after having led by five, and his New Hampshire lead has plunged from 12 points to two. Rasmussen, meanwhile, shows the Illinois senator down by 10 in Ohio--a nine point drop from mid-June--and Quinnipiac finds McCain gaining 15 in Minnesota, two in Michigan and seven in Colorado. All of which underscores the central reality of the race: Obama is ahead--but just barely. Pollster.com's national polling average gives him a two-point lead; RealClear Politics pegs it at four.

So the fact remains. McCain may be "pretty obviously doomed this year," as Kevin Drum recently opined, and you may not, in the words of my NEWSWEEK colleague Howard Fineman, be able to "make up how bad things are going" for him. Furthermore, "Democrats [may] enjoy an average lead of 11.6 percent in generic Congress polls; "the Republican administration [may be] wildly unpopular"; and "the economy [may be] in a tailspin." But McCain is still within striking distance. According to the New Republic's John Judis, that's because Obama "remains the 'mysterious stranger' rather than the 'American Adam' to too many voters"-- that is, voters "who are put off rather than attracted by his race and exotic background," or are simply uncomfortable with his relatively short resume. What's more, Obama's recent efforts to prove his foreign-policy chops, while understandable, may also be somewhat counterproductive. As Stephen Medvic writes, "by doing so, he is priming voters to think about the very issues on which they prefer John McCain. Indeed, his trip overseas was intended to portray him in a positive light on the world stage. It has certainly done that... [But] foreign policy isn't likely to drive many voting decisions in the fall (barring a major international event). As a result, Obama's best bet is to return home as soon as possible and start priming voters on the issue area he can dominate--the economy." In the end, that's why Obama's trip to Berlin, Germany may not matter as much as his stops in places like Berlin, N.H., Berlin, Penn. and Berlin, Wisc.--despite what you're seeing on the tube.

By the way, we hear the brat at Schmidt's is wunderbar.

Related Photo Gallery: Obama, With the World Watching

McCain vs. Obama: Who’s Right on the Surge?

Larry Kaplow — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:21:54 GMT

The U.S. military says there were zero attacks in Baghdad on Wednesday. A year ago, there were an average of 43 a day. The question of how this happened has led to the latest tussle in America's race for the White House. Republican candidate and Iraq War supporter John McCain attributes the improvement to George W. Bush’s troop surge. Democratic candidate and war opponent Barack Obama disagrees. Who’s right? The answer is somewhere in between, with an edge to McCain but with Obama raising important points. If you think military force solves problems best, then you can attribute the success to the troop increase and, probably, it largely is. But if you tend to think politics and winning hearts and minds works best, you can point credibly to other factors that also reduced the bloodshed.

The timeline is rather simple. On Jan. 10, 2007, President Bush ordered the troop increase, calling it the "surge" rather than by the more traditional term, "reinforcements." Gen. David Petraeus, the main proponent of the more than 28,000 additional troops, took command on Feb. 10. It then took until June 15 for all the five surge brigades to position themselves. Between February and June, the troops were amassing and already establishing many of the neighborhood combat outposts that were key in reducing the sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites.

Starting June 15, a 90-day surge plan kicked in with U.S. troops retaking areas that had fallen to chaos or control by militias and Al Qaeda. Violence rates, based on military graphics, dropped steeply from an anarchic peak of more than 1,500 attacks Iraq-wide per week in June 2007. McCain is right that the troop increase was important, perhaps the key when combined with their new tactics, in turning the country around.

But Obama is correct that other things were happening at the same time--and even before. There was a swing in attitudes among Iraqis against the violent overreaching by Al Qaeda and, on the other side, Shiite death squads claiming to fight for anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Sunni tribes in the Anbar province, many of which had been fighting against U.S. forces, basically decided they hated Al Qaeda and its sadistic fanaticism more than they despised the American occupation. That happened in mid and late 2006.

In January of this year General Petraeus told NEWSWEEK about the genesis of the Sunni sea change, encapsulated in the story of Anbar's Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha:

"Before I came back [to Iraq in February 2007] he had already gone to the brigade commander there, Col. Sean MacFarland ... and asked him if it would be OK to point his weapons at Al Qaeda instead of MacFarland's soldiers. And MacFarland, being no fool, said that would be OK and then parked two tanks outside his house. But it took them months to build some forces, to just get going ... March was when we started clearing Ramadi and we had it cleared by about mid-April and it was just a city in varying degrees of ruins."

This week, McCain took his argument one step too far when he noted that the surge began the tribal turn. He said: "Because of the surge, we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening." He also said he meant "surge" in a broad sense, more than just troop increases but also a new American approach to counterinsurgency. But there was never a public debate about helping Sunni tribes kill Al Qaeda. The controversy around the surge was all about the troop increase, which came after the Anbar revolution had started.

McCain is right that the surge did make more forces available to help the tribal fighters and "protect" the sheiks. But they had already turned. Alas, Abu Risha was killed by a car bomb in September. The movement lives on because the Anbar masses still want it to.

Another major turning point was Aug. 29, 2007, when Sadr imposed a ceasefire on his Mahdi Army (JAM) militias. This was during the height of the surge operations, many targeting Sadr's fighters, but appeared to also be influenced heavily by an ugly street battle during a religious pilgrimage between Sadrists forces and other Shiites. JAM was blamed, and Sadr's image was sullied among fellow Shiites.

And U.S. troops also employed canny manipulation and cajoling in street-level contacts with Sadrist leaders, encouraging and threatening them into setting aside violence. Petraeus might say this couldn't have happened without the extra soldiers on the ground, but we don't know for sure. (Petraeus deserves credit for allowing his commanders the leeway to engage the enemy with their mobile phones as much as their rifles.) Along those lines, there were other important doctrinal changes Petraeus brought with him. He made security for Iraqis the No. 1 priority, saying that it would ultimately also make U.S. troops safer--something long overdue. Soldiers came out from the city-size fortresses and lived in Iraqi streets.

Obama has said his early-2007 plan for a careful troop pullout could have also calmed Iraq. Most Iraqis would have said that a U.S. withdrawal then would have continued Iraq's horrible downward spiral. Probably. But the promise of a withdrawal might have won over some Iraqis. Combined with active diplomacy, it might have convinced neighboring countries that don't want a black hole next door to stop fanning the flames. It seems less than likely, but, as Obama says, it wasn't tried, still hasn't been tried and can't be ruled out. He also says the surge took resources and attention from more pressing battlefields in Afghanistan.

The troop increase was crucial in calming the country, but the tribal war against Al Qaeda and Sadr's--albeit wobbly--ceasefire were important, too. Many Iraqis, by the way, would say they deserve credit for lowering the violence by standing up against the gunmen and cooperating with American and Iraqi forces. All true to different degrees, depending on how much you believe in force or people power.

Anger Management

Andrew Romano — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:29:56 GMT

Matt Sayles / AP

When it comes to "volcanic" tempers--and we mean that literally--John McCain is apparently no match for Steve Schmidt, his new campaign guru. McCain yells. McCain curses. McCain occasionally gets in scuffles. But McCain, unlike Schmidt, does not (ahem) lose bodily fluids. According to a lengthy profile published in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, when Schmidt--nicknamed "Bullet" for his burly build and bald pate--gets really angry, his nose begins to bleed. (Schmidt denies the diagnosis.) "The nostrils would flare, he would get very red-faced... and you would just want to quit," a colleague from President Bush's 2004 war room told the paper. "You basically wanted to crash a chair over his head." Those who have worked with Schmidt before say that Team McCain "should steel itself," the Journal reports. Investing in Kleenex might be wise as well.

On the presidential campaign trail, temper tantrums are nothing new. The toxic cocktail of long hours, grueling travel, massive egos and constant public scrutiny is enough to send even the calmest operative over the edge on occasion. But McCain's recent decision to substitute the snappish Schmidt for campaign manager Rick Davis--the formal, even-keeled moneyman who engineered his miraculous primary-season comeback--raises an interesting question. What's the relationship between rage and electoral results--if any? Over the past three decades, an army of presidential Svengali's have made anger a defining feature of their professional personae, wielding it, like Schmidt, as a tool of management. Others, of course, haven't. A quick look at the history books reveals that the latter group may have been more successful in steering their bosses to victory.

Take John Weaver, for example. A lanky, brooding, volatile Texan, Weaver convinced the McCain to challenge George W. Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000--and, as top strategist, lovingly oversaw every aspect of that year's "maverick" campaign. Weaver wasn't exactly placid. In fact, his outbursts were so frequent that staffers gave them a name: "W.O.W. moments," for Wrath of Weaver. He signature move? Throwing things. Pagers. A coffee table. A television. By New Hampshire, Weaver had sent at least two baseballs through office walls and smashed three Nokia cell phones. "I was actually hit by some of the shrapnel," Jim Merrill, McCain's South Carolina director, said at the time. As Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post, "Weaver uses his volatile temper to motivate his staff. If anybody is late for the morning meeting, he orders the next day's held half an hour earlier... Before a telephone tirade, he'll tell people around him to 'watch this.'" McCain, of course, lost the nomination.

Then there's Jimmy Carter. In 1976, Carter entrusted his electoral fortunes to a disheveled Southern operative named Hamilton Jordan, who devised the smart strategy of using the Iowa caucuses to lift the Georgia governor out of obscurity. He was known for "his extraordinary reticence." When truly angry, Jordan didn't lose his temper, but withdrew, physically or mentally. "No one who has covered a Southern courthouse could mistake the look on Jordan's face when he doesn't want to answer: chin uplifted slightly, eyes hooded," wrote the Washington Post. "It's not quite defensive, but it expresses an old Southern notion that power is best exercised quietly, and that only a fool talks about what he's going to do before he's done it." Four years later, however, pollster Pat Caddell--an Irish-American with a legendary temper--had a stronger hold on the reins. "Stories are told, over and over, by veterans of past campaigns: of screaming fights ending with a standard refrain of 'I'll ruin you!' or 'You're finished!,'" wrote the Post. "Of intimidating calls, doors slamming shut, phones slamming down. 'He scars you,' says one recipient of the Caddell Treatment." Carter went on to lose the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan, and Caddell went on to guide Gary Hart, Walter Mondale and Joe Biden to defeat.

I don't mean to blame these losses on Caddell's shouting or Weaver's throwing--or Bill Clinton's red-faced meddlingin this year's primary contest, for that matter. Not at all. Elections are decided by the voters, not the gurus--and there have been too many exceptions (like, say, James "The Ragin' Cajun" Carville in 1992) to justify some sort of rule. That said, the tone at the top can affect (and/or infect) the larger operation--perhaps by breeding resentment, which breeds defiance, which breeds inefficiency--and in recent elections, it seems, a "cooler" management style has prevailed off more often than not. Lee Atwater and Karl Rove--who ran George H.W. Bush's and George W. Bush's successful presidential campaigns--were known as nasty partisan pugilists well-practiced in dirty trickery. But they rarely blew up behind the scenes. The consultant who piloted the DOA John Kerry to the 2004 Democratic nomination, Mary Beth Cahill, was described at the time as "no small talk, no face time, no sucking up to the candidate, none of those operative-style temper tantrums, no passive aggression, no waste"--even if the "Shrum Curse" ultimately prevailed. And Ronald Reagan's people weren't known for their pique.

Will history repeat itself in 2008? This year, Barack Obama appears to be the candidate poised to prosper from in-house equanimity. The senator himself brags that he has "the right temperament for the presidency"-- not "too high and not "too low"--while David Plouffe, his low-key, geeky campaign manager, and David Axelrod, his soft-spoken strategist, have run his bid like it was a "private corporation." "Mr. Obama’s circle of advisers takes seriously his “no drama” mandate," writes the New York Times. "It is a point of pride in his campaign that there have been virtually no serious leaks to the news media... about internal division or infighting." So far this approach has worked wonders for the nominee, who came from nowhere in the Democratic primaries to defeat the party's most powerful machine and now leads in November's polls. Going forward, Schmidt job is to prove that rage can get results. If he can't, blood won't be the only thing he stands to lose.

Level Up's Top Four Gaming Tidbits for July 24th, 2008

N'Gai Croal — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:32:06 GMT

EGO...trip: vindication, or a stopped clock being right twice daily?
WHY...so serious? Or, after laughter comes tears
REW..."Things break, y'know": Xbox 360 or NCAA Football 09?
RND...Which of these radically different posters do you prefer?

...(read more)

Wolffe: In Israel, Obama Stays Cool

Andrew Romano — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:38:20 GMT

Daniel Berehulak / Getty Images

Here's the latest dispatch from my NEWSWEEK colleague Richard Wolffe, who's reporting from Barack Obama's globetrotting roadshow:

One of the tests for Barack Obama on this week's foreign trip is how well he navigates the crosscurrents of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So on a day when he traveled from the Palestinian president's office in Ramallah to the rocket-shelled Israeli town of Sderot, how did he do?

First, the day was not gaffe-free. Answering an Israeli reporter's question in Sderot, he was confused about which Senate committee he served on. "Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee—which is my committee—a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon," he said. Just one problem: he actually sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It wasn't Obama's only mistake of the press conference, held in front of a pile of spent rocket shells that were launched from Gaza into Sderot. When pressed about his pledge, in an earlier Democratic debate, to talk directly to the leaders of rogue states without preconditions, Obama recalled a different response. "I think that what I said in response was that I would at my time and choosing be willing to meet with any leader if I thought it would promote the national-security interests of the United States of America," he explained. "And that continues to be my position." While Obama did indeed explain his pledge in those terms, that nuanced response came much later than the initial debate, held a year ago.

Knowing he'd be under a microscope, Obama had clearly prepared carefully for the trip—so why did he trip up? He gave a clue to the Likud Party's Benjamin Netanyahu, at the start of the day's meetings with Israeli leaders. After an intense five days of travel to Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and Jordan, Obama—like the rest of his staff and press corps—is exhausted. When Netanyahu asked how he was feeling, Obama said, "I could fall asleep standing up."

Still, those were the only blemishes on an otherwise robust day of repeated commitments to Israel's security and the close alliance between the United States and Israel. In Sderot, he turned an expression of support for the terrorized town into something more personal. "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep every night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," he said. "I would expect Israel to do the same thing."

READ THE REST HERE.

McCain: Scenes from a Bethlehem Supermarket

Andrew Romano — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:01:20 GMT

Suzanne Smalley files onscene with McCain in Pennsylvania:

When John McCain descended on a Bethlehem, Penn. grocery store late yesterday afternoon, the unscheduled campaign stop, meant to highlight McCain's concern over skyrocketing food prices, instead quickly became a theater for the absurd. First, a cameraman knocked over several glass jars of Mott's applesauce, which rolled near McCain's feet as he posed for a bevy of cameras while strolling the grocery aisles. Then, the senator's hastily assembled press conference, held in front of a perishable food case labeled "Dairy Delights," was interrupted by the scream of the store's P.A. system announcing a staffer had a phone call. Finally, there was the fact that Renee Gould, the young mother McCain had an extended chat with about the high price of tomatoes and milk, was not a random shopper, but an area resident funneled to the campaign by the local Republican Party. Gould's admission (a reporter cornered her and asked how she came to be there) was ultimately not all that surprising. Even with the amusing mishaps, the entire event came off as canned, and McCain—whose discomfort with the phoniness required by politics has always been evident—spent most of his time shifting uncomfortably.

Still, McCain did what he could to stick to his message, reading from a note card in his hand as he told reporters gathered for the dairy aisle press conference that, "Among other challenges that American families face: The price of a gallon of milk just went over $4 a gallon." McCain, who has tried to focus more on domestic issues recently, also lamented that high oil prices are trickling down to other sectors of the economy and driving up the cost of food. But the senator's effort to set a tone for the press conference was ignored by members of the press, who were not interested in discussing food prices. Instead, reporters hammered McCain on recent foreign policy gaffes; his feelings about the intense attention being paid to Barack Obama's foreign trip; policy toward Israel; and his vice presidential search. (When pressed on the last point, McCain allowed that top contenders Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, are "the future of the Republican party, the next generation of leadership").

After the press conference, McCain made his way back to the front of the store, where Gould was unloading her groceries with the help of her husband and two young daughters. The senator stood awkwardly next to her and again tried to make stilted small talk about the high price of food. Gould coyly asked, "You're going to be my bagger?" McCain didn't, in fact, bag and seemed to be searching for conversation topics, even as he looked into a field of cameras. Gould's bill came to $105, which she noted is more than she used to pay.

McCain was a hit with the crowd, but the stampeding media was not. Most in the crowd seemed to take the side of the stern campaign staffers demanding reporters stay at least six feet from the senator. "They're rude," one woman could be heard saying about the reporters, who were camped out with boom mikes and note pads fighting for prime real estate with a view of McCain. Other shoppers were merely dumbfounded to show up for groceries mid-afternoon and find a presidential candidate on the stump with a full entourage of cameras. "It's kind of weird with all this media here," said Amber Huff, 23, looking around in a daze. But Huff had a camera of her own and documented the moment by taking a photo of McCain with her hot pink cell phone. Shoppers in Kalamazoo, Toledo and Reno take note—campaign staffers say they plan to start making many more such stops in the near future.

The Filter: July 24, 2008

Andrew Romano — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:07:26 GMT

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

THE DEMOCRATS' DILEMMA
(Joel Kotkin, The American)
This Democratic ascendancy is by no means guaranteed for the long run. The changing nature of the party casts its future in doubt, particularly after 2008. Much of this has to do with how the party’s base has shifted, and where that base may lead it over the coming decades... The swing to the Democrats in recent years reflects in part the natural rhythm of American politics. The Democrats declined in the 1970s in part because the country recoiled from the failures of the Great Society. The bright Democratic prospects of 2008 are similarly a reaction to the Bush years. Yet today’s Democratic revival represents something far more profound. Rather than a shift to the “middle,” the current Democratic tide reflects a long-term secular shift in the composition of our economy and our class structure... Increasingly, the core Democratic constituency—and, even more so, the base of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign—consists not of working- and middle-class whites but of African-Americans and a rising new class of affluent, well-educated professionals. This second group, largely white but certainly spread across racial groups, has begun to supplant the old working- and middle-class base of the party. For the most part it differs from the old middle class of shopkeepers, skilled industrial workers, and small farmers, constituencies that have struggled as the economy has globalized and been transformed by the information revolution... Now the Democrats could soon be in danger of duplicating the Republican mistakes. The Clintons won by “triangulation” and appealing to the broad range of middle-class voters. But Obama’s Democrats could become the mirror image of Rove’s Republicans, extolling the superiority of their base and its values over those of other, less “enlightened” populations.

VOTER UNEASE WITH OBAMA LINGERS DESPITE HIS LEAD
(Gerald F. Seib and Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal)
Midway through the election year, the presidential campaign looks less like a race between two candidates than a referendum on one of them -- Sen. Barack Obama. With the nominations of both parties effectively settled for more than a month, the key question in the contest isn't over any single issue being debated between the Democrats' Sen. Obama or the Republicans' Sen. John McCain. The focus has turned to the Democratic candidate himself: Can Americans get comfortable with the background and experience level of Sen. Obama? This dynamic is underscored in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The survey's most striking finding: Fully half of all voters say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. Obama would be as they decide how they will vote, while only a quarter say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. McCain would be. The challenge that presents for Sen. Obama is illustrated by a second question. When voters were asked whether they could identify with the background and values of the two candidates, 58% said they could identify with Sen. McCain on that account, while 47% said the same of Sen. Obama. More than four in 10 said the Democratic contender doesn't have values and a background they can identify with. Those findings suggest voters' views of Sen. Obama are more fluid than his relatively steady lead indicates.

OBAMA'S TOUR DE FORCE
(David Broder, Washington Post)
It made no sense when Barack Obama left the country on his nine-day overseas tour for some of my fellow columnists to describe it as a high-risk venture. Foreign leaders, who can read the polls as well as anyone, would go out of their way not to embarrass a man who may, six months from now, be president of the United States. Obama prepares thoroughly for the big occasions. He is almost always well-briefed, and he was traveling in sharp company -- with Sens. Jack Reed and Chuck Hagel -- so you knew he would be thoroughly ready for these meetings. The chance of a major screw-up was minimal. And, as millions of Americans who watched the primary campaign learned, Obama is invariably articulate and well-spoken. There would be no verbal gaffes. So where was the risk? It existed mainly in the minds of some journalists and, perhaps, in the musings of Obama staffers who wanted to hype the journey. Acknowledging all that, it is still the case that Obama has pulled it off in great style and thereby enhanced his credentials for the Oval Office. What he could not have guaranteed was the role that luck played in the surrounding events and the cast of supporting players.

MCCAIN STILL WAITING FOR HIS TURN AT GOOD LUCK
(Michael D. Shear, Washington Post)
It seemed like a great way to counter Obamamania. Sen. John McCain would board a helicopter in New Orleans today, skim quickly over the Gulf of Mexico and land on an oil rig -- a made-for-TV moment to highlight his call for offshore drilling, an issue that Republicans believe will be a big winner in November. Then came Hurricane Dolly, a Category 2 storm that made a helicopter ride impossible. And then, improbably, a 600-foot oil tanker collided with a barge on the Mississippi River, creating a 12-mile oil slick and causing diesel fumes to waft over the city's French Quarter. The trip was off. In this campaign, it seems, McCain just can't catch a break. Through a series of missteps, gaffes and bad luck, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has endured a difficult week in what has been a choppy campaign. He now has no major event to offset Sen. Barack Obama's speech at Berlin's famed Victory Column, where a huge turnout is expected. Instead, he will be in Columbus, Ohio, speaking at a nighttime cancer event... On the other side of the world, Obama seemed blessed with perfect weather and perfect timing. At one stop, the senator from Illinois was filmed in a Kuwaiti gym shooting a basketball from behind the three-point line. Handing a microphone away, he dribbled a bit, struck a couple of poses for the troops, and warned, "I may not make the first one, but I'll make one eventually." He then let it fly. Swish. The competing visual from McCain was the 71-year-old senator riding in a golf cart during his visit to Kennebunkport, Maine, to meet with George H.W. Bush at the former president's retreat.

CANDIDATES SPAR OVER TROOP SURGE AND IRAQ CHRONOLOGY
(Michael Cooper, New York Times)
Mr. McCain bristled in an interview with the “CBS Evening News” on Tuesday when asked about Mr. Obama’s contention that while the added troops had helped reduce violence in Iraq, other factors had helped, including the Sunni Awakening movement, in which thousands of Sunnis were enlisted to patrol neighborhoods and fight the insurgency, and the Iraqi government’s crackdown on Shiite militias. “I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened,” Mr. McCain told Katie Couric, noting that the Awakening movement began in Anbar Province when a Sunni sheik teamed up with Sean MacFarland, a colonel who commanded an Army brigade there. “Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others,” Mr. McCain said. “And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.” The Obama campaign was quick to note that the Anbar Awakening began in the fall of 2006, several months before President Bush even announced the troop escalation strategy, which became known as the surge. (No less an authority than Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, testified before Congress this spring that the Awakening “started before the surge, but then was very much enabled by the surge.”) ... But several foreign policy analysts said that if Mr. McCain got the chronology wrong, his broader point — that the troop escalation was crucial for the Awakening movement to succeed and spread — was right. “I would say McCain is three-quarters right in this debate,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

MCCAIN'S FOREIGN POLICY FRUSTRATION
(Joe Klein, Time)
"I had the courage and the judgment to say that I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," John McCain said during a Rochester, N.H., town meeting on July 22. "It seems to me that Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." It was a remarkable statement, as intemperate a personal attack as I've ever heard a major-party candidate make in a presidential campaign, the sort of thing that no potential President of the United States should ever be caught saying. (A prudent candidate has aides sling that sort of mud.) It was also inevitable... In the end, both Obama and McCain seemed to have a piece of the truth about Iraq, but Obama's truth was larger and more strategic. Obama had been right about the war in the first place. It was a disastrous idea, a phenomenal waste of lives and American credibility that diverted focus from our real enemy, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Obama was right about the war now: the progress in Iraq was enabling a quicker withdrawal — a plan already hinted at by Bush. And Obama was right about the future: the Iraqis don't want long-term U.S. bases on their territory, a McCain keystone and the source of his infamous comment about staying in Iraq for 100 years. McCain's piece of the truth was tactical: he was right about the surge and right about the brilliance of David Petraeus' battle plan, which had helped quiet down Iraq. McCain was justifiably infuriated that Obama wouldn't acknowledge that success... McCain's greatest claim to the presidency — his overseas expertise — now seems squandered. He has appeared brittle and inflexible, slow to adapt to changes on the ground, slow to grasp the full implications not only of the improving situation in Iraq but also of the worsening situation in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan.

WITH ARIZONA CHANGING, MCCAIN FOCUSES ON HOME
(Jennifer Steinhauer, New York Times)
As a general rule, Senator John McCain does not alert the news media when he eats breakfast in Arizona. But on a Monday morning this month, Mr. McCain campaigned in a local diner, after a Sunday stop at his campaign office here, where he urged volunteers to “make sure we get our voters registered, to make sure we are organized.” In the sea of uncertainty that defines American politics, presidential candidates have generally been able to count on the residents of their home state, Al Gore’s loss of Tennessee in 2000 being a notable exception. But a variety of factors have made Mr. McCain’s chances in Arizona less assured than they ordinarily would seem, which his campaign has acknowledged. The number of independent voters in Arizona has risen 12 percent since 2004, and those voters have helped send a Democrat to the governor’s mansion and given the party four of the state’s eight Congressional seats — including two in 2006, one in a historically Republican district. At the same time, Arizona Democrats, like many of their counterparts around the country, have outpaced Republicans in voter registration, adding almost 20,000 voters to the rolls since March, compared with the Republican majority’s 8,600 new voters. The second-term Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, remains wildly popular. Last month, the McCain campaign startlingly added Arizona to its list of 24 “battleground states,” a fact that state Democrats have clung to like sprinkles on a soft-serve ice cream cone.

A TALE OF TWO FLIP FLOPPERS
(Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal)
John McCain and Barack Obama have both changed positions in this campaign. That's OK. Voters understand that politicians can and, sometimes, should change their views. After all, voters do. Witness the wide swings in their answers to opinion polls. But before accepting the changes, voters typically ask themselves three questions: Does the candidate admit he's shifting? What's the new information that altered his thinking? Does the change seem reasonable and not calculating? Sen. McCain has changed his position on drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf. But because he explained this change by saying that $4-a-gallon gasoline caused him to re-evaluate his position, voters are likely to accept it... Mr. McCain flip-flopped on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. He'd voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he'd "like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans." Now he supports their continuation because, he says, letting them expire would increase taxes and he opposes tax hikes. Besides, he recognizes that the tax cuts have helped the economy. At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. Sen. Obama has shifted recently on public financing, free trade, Nafta, welfare reform, the D.C. gun ban, whether the Iranian Quds Force is a terrorist group, immunity for telecom companies participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the status of Jerusalem, flag lapel pins, and disavowing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And not only does he refuse to explain these flip-flops, he acts as if they never occurred.

MCCAIN AND OBAMA TAX PLANS ARE CRITICIZED
(Stephen Braun, Los Angeles Times)
The competing tax plans laid out by Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain would both add trillions of dollars to the national debt and could add to the tax system's complexity, a nonpartisan tax research group concluded Wednesday in a newly released report. Both campaigns assert that their plans to continue many Bush-era tax cuts and offer new reductions would aid the economy without massive new spending. But the Washington-based Tax Policy Center warned that under either candidate, "the debt would likely continue to rise as it has over the past eight years." Obama's plan -- cuts targeted to middle- and low-income Americans and increases for the wealthy -- would increase the national debt by an estimated $3.4 trillion in the next decade, the center said. Under a similar analysis, McCain's plan -- largely a continuation of Bush's tax reductions -- would add $5 trillion. The deficit is now $9.5 trillion.

GENERATION GAP WIDENS IN 2008 ELECTORATE
(Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal)
Voter preferences have long been split by race and gender, but this year's election is adding another divide: a sharp age gap. Democrat Barack Obama has a strong lead among younger voters, and Republican John McCain is solidly in front among older voters. That divide has grown in the past month, according to the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. "There's a huge generation gap," said pollster Neil Newhouse, a Republican who conducts the poll with Democrat Peter D. Hart... On age, the poll found that 55% of voters aged 18 to 34 prefer the 46-year-old Sen. Obama, while 31% favored Sen. McCain. That 24-point edge is up from a 13-point advantage for Sen. Obama in last month's survey. Sen. McCain, who turns 72 next month, would be the oldest person elected to a first term as president. At the same time, Sen. McCain's lead has ticked up among the oldest voters. He is now favored by 51% of those aged 65 and up, versus 41% for Sen. Obama. That 10-point gap is up from seven points in June. The gap appears to be much greater than it was four years ago. In 2004, exit polls found that while younger voters favored Democrat John Kerry and older voters favored President George W. Bush, the margins were much tighter.

GOP LOSING NEW MEDIA WAR
(Jonathan Martin, Politico)
Republicans have no lack of would-be George F. Wills. But what they really need are some more Robert D. Novaks. The distinction between the two prominent conservative journalists isn't always obvious, but it's nevertheless important to understand: One almost exclusively writes opinion pieces, while the other offers reportage with a point of view. The same might be said of the emerging differences between the conservative presence on the Internet and the liberal one: The right is engaged in the business of opining while the left features sites that offer a more reportorial model. At first glance, these divergent approaches might not seem consequential. But as the 2008 campaign progresses, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the absence of any websites on the right devoted to reporting—as opposed to just commenting on the news—is proving politically costly to Republicans. While conservatives are devoting much of their Internet energy to analysis, their counterparts on the left are taking advantage of the rise of new media to create new institutions devoted to unearthing stories, putting new information into circulation and generally crowding the space traditionally taken by traditional media. And it almost always comes at the expense of GOP politicians.

Beijing's "Blue" Skies

Quindlen Krovatin — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:28:15 GMT

I suppose it was inevitable.

After four days of (relatively) blue skies, the summer haze has descended once more upon Beijing. Nature's palette includes many lovely hues of blue: cerulean and cyan, turquoise and teal, azure and aqua; but the blue of a Beijing sky is seemingly indescribable and lies somewhere along the visible spectrum between tar heel pride and acid-washed jeans.

Granted, what we’re looking at today, Thursday, July 24 – a sky you can’t quite call overcast – is better than the polluted pall that usually hangs over our God-forsaken city. But still, it’s a sky the color of bed sheets that have been slept in too many times. Shadows lack defined edges. Visibility barely extends beyond the buildings across the street.

Which makes us wonder, will Beijing’s ambitious plan to reduce pollution in the capital ahead of the Olympics actually work?

Cars are only allowed to drive on alternating days according to whether their license plates end in odd or even numbers (on the first day, Sunday, July 20, odd-numbered vehicles stayed home). But there are significantly more cars with even-numbered plates in Beijing because Chinese people prefer digits ending in 6 or 8, which are considered lucky.

Traffic seems slightly reduced. But as someone who lives in an apartment overlooking the East Second Ring Road between Dongsishitiao and Chaoyangmen Bridges, I can tell you that congestion remains a significant impediment to progress for at least five hours a day (7:00AM to 10:00AM and 5:00PM to 7:00PM).

Part of the problem is Olympic lanes – specially designated thoroughfares that lead to and from the Olympic Village and Venues. But the lanes are poorly marked in most places, and a normal lane can suddenly become an Olympic lane without warning. This leads to bottlenecking delays as drivers hastily merge into other lanes rather than risk steep fines.

Those who aren’t on the roads use public transportation instead, and the opening of three new subway lines this past weekend was meant to mitigate the effects of a sudden influx of straphangers. But as someone who rides the subway every day, I can tell you that the trains are packed to capacity and the list of good manners and behaviors for the Chinese people is regularly flouted.

Blue skies are always a joy, yet with clarity comes concomitant heat. Beijing is burning up. But The Weather Channel's 10-day forecast appears to indicate we’ll be getting some much-needed, man-made rain early next week. Let’s hope it can wash away this haze and cool off the city’s cramped, cantankerous commuters.

Can Obama Take the 'High Road' to the White House?

Andrew Romano — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:02:13 GMT

As John McCain and his Republican allies have ratcheted up their attacks on Barack Obama's foreign-policy record in recent days, they've repeated one criticism in particular: that Obama once voted "against our troops." The swipe first appeared last Friday in a McCain spot called, appropriately enough, "Troop Funding"; it resurfaced today in the RNC's new "Obama Chooses Washington Over Our Military" ad (above), which, as we reported earlier, is set to air tomorrow in Berlin, N.H., Berlin, Penn. and Berlin, Wisc. "There are few votes as important as funding our men and women in uniform," says the announcer. "But when our military needed necessary resources, Barack Obama failed to stand up."

The attack itself--which has been a staple of the Republican playbook since the Iraq war began in 2003--isn't particularly noteworthy. What's intriguing, however, is how much Obama's response to it has changed over the past five days. As we wrote last week, portraying Obama's 2007 vote against a war-funding bill is misleading--especially because McCain himself voted against H.R. 1591, an emergency spending bill designed to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and provide more than $1 billion to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The truth is, McCain was opposing a bill that included a timetable for withdrawal and Obama was opposing one that didn't. Neither candidate was actually voting "against the troops."

Last Friday, Chicago chose to respond to "Troop Funding" by fighting fire with fire. "MCCAIN REPEATEDLY VOTED AGAINST AND OBAMA REPEATEDLY VOTED FOR FUNDING FOR MILITARY EQUIPMENT FOR SOLDIERS," wrote spokesman Hari Sevugan in an email to reporters--repeating, in effect, the same misleading, out-of context attack that McCain was leveling against the Illinois senator. Today, however, Sevugan--now reacting to the RNC's ad--was a changed man. "There are honest differences between Senator Obama’s position on Iraq and Senator McCain’s," he said. "But there’s no question that both support our troops. Under the RNC’s definition, John McCain would have also chosen politics over our military when he urged George Bush to veto funding for the troops, and we know that’s not the case. This is the sort of distasteful and misleading attack from the Rove playbook that the American people are tired of." As Ben Smith puts it, Sevugan went for "a high-road tone last seen (on both sides) sometime late last summer." This doesn't mean, necessarily, that Obama is taking the high road; it means that he wants voters to think he's taking the high road. Going after the political process is as much a political tactic as going after your opponent's strengths.

The shift is subtle, but it's also revealing. In the five days since "Troop Funding" first aired, Obama has enjoyed a remarkable run of foreign-policy successes--or strokes of luck--from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki endorsing his withdrawal plan to President Bush dispatching a government official to chat with Iranian leaders. McCain, meanwhile, has been forced to go negative--early and often--to compete for coverage. The result is a definite change in dynamic. While Obama now "seems" confident, competent and unperturbed--swanning around the globe with foreign leaders has that effect--McCain suddenly "seems" angry, annoyed and even desperate. (NB: "Seems" is the operative word here; it's about political perceptions.) On Friday, Team Obama felt they had to aggressively rebut the "anti-soldier" attack; today, they're comfortable dismissing it as "old politics" and floating above the fray. Chicago clearly hopes that Obama's overseas adventure will allow him to maintain that kind of altitude for the rest of the race. But they should be careful what they wish for. If you'll recall, Al Gore and John Kerry followed similar flight patterns in 2000 and 2004--and lost. Obama is undoubtedly a savvier strategist. Still, he shouldn't forget that McCain--and the Bush-Rove alums on his team--know a thing or two about combat.

Make Mine a Double--and Turn Down That #*^%!! Music

Sharon Begley — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:22:53 GMT

A Times Roman font walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Sorry, we don’t serve your type here.”

No, what I meant was, a guy walks into a bar with a duck on his head. The bartender says, “Can I help you?” The duck says, “yeah, you can get this guy off my butt!” Or maybe, two guys walk into a bar; the third one, not being an idiot, ducks (thank you, funny2).

But seriously, one guy walks into one bar, has a few, and then into another one down the street, and has a few more, faster. What’s the difference between the two bars? If scientists who study drinking behavior are right, it may be the loud music in the second one. That, researchers will report in the October issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (it’s also available at the journal’s online “Early View” page), can make you drink more, in less time.

“Previous research had shown that fast music can cause fast drinking, and that music versus no music can cause a person to spend more time in a bar,” said Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of behavioral sciences at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, who led the study. But “this is the first time that an experimental approach in a real context found the effects of loud music on alcohol consumption.”

By “real context,” he means the two bars in the west of France that he and his colleagues visited—purely for research purposes!—on three Saturday evenings. They surreptitiously observed 40 men between the ages of 18 to 25 who had ordered a glass of draft beer. They also toggled the sound levels of the top 40 songs on the bars’ playlist between 72 decibels, which is normal, and 88 dB, considered loud. Result: the louder the music, the more the guys drank, and in less time than when the volume was turned down.

One reason may be that loud music causes higher physiological arousal—a faster heart rate, higher blood pressure and the like, which led the men “to drink faster and to order more drinks,” said Guéguen. Alternatively, loud music may make it so hard to hold a conversation that patrons drink more because they talk less.

The lesson he takes from this is that “we need to encourage bar owners to play music at more of a moderate level ... and make consumers aware that loud music can influence their alcohol consumption.” We won’t hold our breath while bars weigh the increased revenue from getting patrons to drink more, faster, against the social virtue of doing something as simple as turning down the volume in order to reduce how much booze they sell.

The Kid Stays in the Picture

Andrew Romano — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:21:23 GMT

With the U.S. media elite slobbering over Barack Obama's every overseas event, Team McCain has found some pretty creative ways to keep its candidate in this week's papers.

Initially, "a very senior aide" ginned up buzz for the Republican nominee by telling veteran conservative columnist Bob Novak (inaccurately) that a veep announcement was imminent and "suggest[ing] [he] put it out. "I've since been told by certain people that this was a dodge and that they were trying to get some publicity to rain on Obama's campaign,'' Novak said yesterday on FOX News. "It's pretty reprehensible if it's true."

Then McCain's staff started to make fun of the press--first with a web ad declaring that reporters are "in love" with Obama, then with laminated press passes labeled “McCain Press Corps JV Squad” and “Left behind to report in America.” Both gimmicks garnered significant coverage, mostly because journalists love to write about themselves.

Finally, while Obama rallies thousands in Berlin, Germany tomorrow, the RNC will air radio ads promoting McCain’s candidacy in three domestic Berlins: Berlin, New Hampshire; Berlin, Pennsylvania; and Berlin, Wisconsin. Adorable! Given that a combined total of 18,000 people live in that trio of swing-state towns, the point--again--is to get mentioned in stories that otherwise would've been 100 percent Obama, and not, you know, to get votes.

After all that, you'd think the creative minds at McCain HQ would be exhausted. Think again. Aiming to counterprogram Obama's Berlin speech on trans-Atlantic relations, Team McCain announced this afternoon that the candidate will helicopter from Louisiana to an oil rig in the Gulf Coast Thursday to make the case for expanded off-shore drilling. According to Politico's Jonathan Martin, "the GOP nominee will be joined by a small press pool of reporters and photographers on a trek sure to offer memorable images." Even better: Hurricane Dolly is currently lashing the South Texas coast with sustained winds of 100 mph--which is something, Martin writes, that "campaign aides have been watching... closely." Here's hoping that the forecast is safe enough for McCain to follow through--but still "dangerous" enough to involve some dramatic breezes and foreboding clouds. Because nothing says "cover it" to a cable producer like the story of a man pursuing his photo-op, the elements be damned.

No word yet whether McCain plans to address global warming from the inside of an active volcano.

UPDATE, 4:00 p.m.: Only an hour after finalizing the oil-rig adventure, Team McCain has called the whole thing off. The reason? "Weather," says spokesman MIchael Goldfarb. Or at least that's what they want us to believe. It's worth noting, however, that "the Coast Guard closed 29 miles of the Mississippi River at New Orleans after a 600-foot tanker and a barge loaded with fuel oil collided Wednesday, breaking the barge in half" and spilling "more than 419,000 gallons of heavy, almost tar-like fuel" that formed "a slick 12 miles long." Promoting off-shore drilling within spitting distance of a giant oil spill would've guaranteed considerable coverage for McCain--but probably not the kind he was looking for.

I am the only one who thinks the senator should invest in some new lucky charms? Rumor has it that Obama keeps a "tiny monkey god" in his pocket--in case anyone over in Crystal City was wondering.

Comparing the Candidates, By Design

Andrew Romano — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:12:08 GMT

New posters from John McCain and Barack Obama. Which would you rather have on your bedroom wall? (Other than "neither.")

(Via Ambinder)

Design can be revealing. Both posters seek to portray their subjects as steely, messianic, future-oriented leaders--which is why they're both gazing at some distant, meaningful horizon. But whereas the Obama graphic supports this message visually--the upward sweep of the text conveys optimism while also evoking the internationalist spirit of modern Europe (see: the bold diagonals and sans serif fonts of Bauhaus-style design)--McCain's seems somewhat conflicted. "Wisdom" equals intelligence but also suggests the past. Marbling connotes solidity but also implies antiquity (both classical and Clinton-era). The warplanes may be returning from combat--or leaving on a mission. And you can't tell if the sun is rising or setting.

Also, it looks like the cover of "The Sum of All Fears" by Tom Clancy.

UPDATE: More on Obama and Bauhaus from Meaningful Distractions: "Many Germans will recognize this little tip-of-the-hat to German graphic design history, and those that recognize it will appreciate it. This type of move wouldn’t even occur to the McCain campaign, despite the fact that McCain was born around the time German Bauhaus was all the rage."