When it comes to presidential politics, 2008 is a year of firsts. The first black nominee. The first serious woman contender. The first Latino candidate, the first Mormon candidate and the first time anyone's ever paid attention to Ron Paul. In that pioneering spirit--and in the spirit of postmodernism--let me hereby identify a meta-riffic new campaign tactic that arose in response to Barack Obama's candidacy, that flourished in the hands of Bill Clinton during the Democratic primary and that has now found a home in John McCain's Crystal City headquarters.

I'm referring, of course, to playing the "playing the race card" card.  

At 12:00 p.m., McCain campaign manager Rick Davis sent a terse, two-sentence statement to reporters. "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck," it read. "It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong." Soon, Davis was claiming on MSNBC that Team Obama "has been feeding to journalists, all night last night and all day today, the notion that somehow something that we have done in our campaign... had racial overtones," while McCain himself  was characterizing the "race card" accusation as "legitimate" and confessing that he's "disappointed that Senator Obama would say the things he’s saying.”

My initial reaction was confusion. What did Obama say? I asked myself. Did he call McCain "Whitey McWhiteguy"? Did he deliver a Black Power salute from an Olympic podium? Did he accuse his rival of race-baiting, or bigotry, or not having any black friends? These options seemed unlikely. For one thing, Obama is not a masochistic madman bent on his own political destruction. For another, Obama has been very careful--with the partial exception of South Carolina--to never overtly encourage the accusations of racism, lest they undermine his appeal to the country's white majority as an African-American candidate who, unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, isn't also seen as the "bearer of racial grievance." So I couldn't imagine he'd start now. It certainly wouldn't help him politically. But then I remembered: one doesn't actually have to play the "race card" to end up on the receiving end of the "playing the race card" card. In fact, that's sort of the point.

Apparently, the McCain campaign was reacting--some would say overreacting--to a series of statements Obama made yesterday in Missouri. "Since they don’t have any new ideas, the only strategy they’ve got in this election is to try to scare you about me," he told supporters in Union. "They’re going to try to say that I’m a risky guy. They’re going to try to say, 'Well, you know, he’s got a funny name and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills." Some observers, like Jake Tapper of ABC News, interpreted this as Obama "accus[ing] McCain of running a racist, xenophobic campaign." On the surface, I can see why this makes sense. After all, Washington and Lincoln look pretty white on those greenbacks.

But there are two pretty compelling reasons why this doesn't wash. First, Obama didn't say that anyone is misbehaving now. He said they're "going to" misbehave in some amorphous future. Some have argued that this is a mere semantic difference--in effect, "a pretty clear effort at having it both ways." But that's not how it strikes me. To me, Obama's point seems neither accusatory nor, truth be told, predictive. It seems strategic. What he's doing is acknowledging all the subterranean doubts and suspicions that threaten his bid--his race, his name, his otherness--and saying, preemptively, that to succumb to them would be to fall prey to "politics as usual." He's neutralizing the insinuations that voters are bound to hear (from friends, neighbors, radio hosts, whomever). But he's not saying that substantive disagreements--on the issues, on his record--are somehow race-related. And he's certainly not calling McCain a racist.

To see why I don't think Obama "played the race card"--and why I don't quite buy the McCain camp's defense, which is that Obama is using race to "delegitimize any line of attack against him"--try removing race from the equation and imagining the Republican nominee delivering a similar soliloquy: "They're going to try to say I'm confused. They're going to try to say that I'm too angry. They're going to try to say, 'Well, you know, he's a North Vietnamese collaborator with PTSD and he's older than all the presidents on the dollar bills. But that's just because they don't want to debate me on the issues." Would this be "playing the age card"? Or would it be a legitimate (if preemptive) defensive maneuver against illegitimate insinuations--a maneuver, in other words, designed to focus the electorate on the stuff that McCain wants them to focus on?

There are ways, of course, that Obama could have played the race card. If he had accused McCain, for example, of implying that he has "a taste for young white women" by featuring his face alongside Britney Spears' and Paris Hilton's in yesterday's "Celeb" ad--as liberal blogger Josh Marshall has done--the charge might have merit. But Obama rightly recognized that while the spot may have been a lot of things--an insinuation about his foreignness; a potential homage to Leni Riefenstahl; a bald-faced bid (look! starlets!) for free media attention--it wasn't a subliminal message about miscegenation. Fortunately, every sentient life form knows who Hilton and Spears are, making it impossible to imagine them--unlike the anonymous blond bimbo saying "Call me" in 2006's infamous Harold Ford, Jr. commercial--as Obama's paramours. So the Democrat simply dismissed it. And despite Davis' insinuation on MSNBC that Marshall's item and others like it "did not come out of the blue," there's no evidence, or reason to suspect, that Team Obama was whispering in anyone's ear.

The second counterargument is that if McCain actually believed that Obama's Missouri remarks were "divisive, negative, shameful and wrong," he probably would've mentioned it back in June--when Obama said the same thing at a Florida fundraising event. "They’re going to try to make you afraid of me," Obama told donors. "‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?’" The Florida remarks, in fact, were more explicitly "racial" than anything Obama said yesterday in Missouri. But McCain didn't complain. Nor did he complain any of the dozens of other times Obama expressed similar sentiments.

McCain's previous silence proves that when playing the "playing the race card" card, the impression you create--an impression of your rival saying something racially outrageous that benefits you politically--is far more important than whether or not you actually think he said something racially outrageous. In this case, I don't believe that's what Obama did--and judging by June 21, neither does McCain. But unlike whoever was running the show back then, new head honcho Steve Schmidt--a pugilistic Karl Rove protégé--seems to have decided that it benefits his boss to give voters the impression that Obama is the type of person who "plays the race card" (even though Obama strenuously, and necessarily, avoids doing so). And that's what's unsettling about this incident. If Schmidt and Co. were worried, as they say, that Obama was trying frame any "conventional campaign attacks as race-based" and were merely seeking to pre-empt his efforts, they could've simply said "we've never played the race card and we never will." But instead they lashed out. In playing offense instead of defense, Team McCain is actively characterizing Obama as another Al Sharpton--a "divisive, negative" Black Politician with vocal grievances who uses race as both shield and sword. This strikes me as too convenient to dismiss as a coincidence.

It's too bad. Until now, McCain has honorably avoided the tricky pitfalls of race. Back in February, he apologized for a local shock jock's questionable comments, and in April, he condemned an ad by the North Carolina Republican Party featuring images of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He knows firsthand what playing the race card actually looks like, having watched during the 2000 South Carolina primary as the delightful allies of opponent George W. Bush falsely alleged that his adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was his lovechild with a black woman. But thanks to his new coaches, McCain is no longer batting 1.000.

I guess there's a first time for everything.

UPDATE, 7:58 p.m.: A smart, and important, point from reader CalexanderJ:

I'll cut McCain a little bit of slack. Obama by using the amorphous "they" is on some level suggesting that the McCain campaign would resort to race based attacks. So far the official campaign has been good at avoided that... So on some level they have a right to be upset at the suggestion that they would bring up race when so far they had not. Of course their Race Card response seems to vindicate Obama's suggestion that racial attacks would be forthcoming, so the McCain campaign effectively ceded the high ground.

I agree. 
 

(AP Photo / Mike Roemer) 

By Holly Bailey 

RACINE, Wisc.--John McCain is stumping in Wisconsin today, where--no surprise--the biggest story locally is not his visit but the ongoing debate over what the Green Bay Packers should do about Brett Favre. "It's broken up long friendships," said one local reporter.

The big question among the press corps here today: Would someone ask McCain about Favre? The answer is yes. At his town hall meeting this afternoon in Racine, the very first question came from a man who stood up and praised McCain's experience and credentials. Given that, the man said, what did he think the Packers should do about its aging quarterback? If he were to weigh in, he might very well likely cement a win here in November, the man helpfully noted. McCain paused for several seconds, as audience members laughed and, to be honest, looked a little anxious. "There's a lot of controversy I have jumped into in my time," McCain said. "(But) I am not so dumb that I am going to jump into that one."

Probably a good decision. Of course, McCain has talked about Farve before. On his campaign plane earlier this year, the Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes (a rabid Packers fan) broke the news to McCain that Farve had retired. His reaction: relief. "Actually I'm glad he retired," McCain told him. "I was worried he was going to get hurt."

Barack Obama can summon 200,000 swooning Teutons to Berlin to hear him speak. Barack Obama can sink a three-pointer on his first try--nothing but net. Barack Obama can even part the Red Sea, provided you ask nicely. But can Barack Obama do this?

(Hat tip to TNR's Michael Crowley)

Yes, that's Virginia governor--and "main object of [Obama veepwatch] speculation"--Tim Kaine playing the mouth organ with a group of Crooked Road country musicians. In a jean jacket. And not humiliating himself. I'd say this vaults him into first place, at least among shortlisters, for the coveted role of Obama's "Ambassador to Appalachia." Unless, of course, Evan Bayh breaks out a mandolin.

And yet: I'm starting to suspect that Kaine, though "able," may not by "rising" as fast as the Great Mentioner would have us believe. Mainly it's because the guy can't seem to shut up. First, he was all "my mom loves the [veep buzz]." Then he bragged to a Virginia carnivalgoer that the list "seems to be getting shorter and I’m still being mentioned." He even chuckled when a friend said he was Obama's top choice. In the past two days alone, he's done interviews with WTOP Radio, NBC News and Charlie Rose. Given the radio silence from Obama's other rumored veeps--Bayh, Biden, Sebelius et al.--and given that the buzz originally came from Kaine's associates, not Obama's, the governor's sudden obsession with the spotlight certainly seems purposeful.

There are only three explanations, really. Either a) Kaine is acting alone, b) Obama is releasing a trial balloon or c) the campaign is using Kaine to divert the media's attention from the real contenders. None of these options bodes particularly well for Kaine. A trial balloon is the least likely, given Chicago's insistence on total secrecy, and even then, assessments of Kaine have hardly been glowing. The lone gunman theory is more plausible--but it's safe bet, in that case, that Kaine's loose lips have hurt, not helped, his chances with Obama's disciplined crew. And if Kaine is serving as a distraction at the nominee's behest--admittedly a pretty convoluted hypothesis--he was never worth obsessing over in the first place.

Not that I necessarily subscribe to any of this, but it's important to maintain a little bit of perspective in these heady, substance-free days of vice-presidential speculation. Even with all the bitchin' harmonica solos.
 

Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

Here's Jake Sherman from NEWSWEEK's D.C. bureau on whether Bill's cash flow will affect Hillary's debt relief. My take: while it would be a nice show of solidarity for Obama supporters to send money Clintonward, I don't think it should be seen as some sort of requirement--especially given that a) much of HRC's dough was spent attacking their candidate, b) it's much harder to raise money for a former contender than a current nominee and c) Bill still has the golden touch (as Jake's reporting amply illustrates). Unless I'm missing something, Hillary could just write a check from their $100 million joint bank account and call it a day, a la Mitt Romney. So I can see why some Dems are inclined to dismiss these kinds of complaints.

Bill Clinton collected $10,085,000 in speeches alone in 2007, a figure that underscores his continued rock-star credentials on the international lecture circuit, according Sen. Hillary Clinton's financial disclosure forms for 2007, which were released Wednesday morning by the Secretary of the Senate.

The Clintons also earned between $11 million and $26 million last year by selling stocks from their personal portfolio, according to the newly released figures. The stock sales appear to be the proceeds from a blind trust that Senator Clinton announced she planned to liquidate during her presidential campaign to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

The new disclosures could have political consequences for the Clintons. By calling more attention to the couple's personal wealth, as well as the former president's enormous earning power, the figures could make it more difficult to persuade Democratic Party donors to help pay off Hillary Clinton's $22.5 million in campaign debts—nearly half of which is owed to the Clintons personally. After Clinton dropped out of the presidential race, Barack Obama agreed to ask his top donors to help his defeated rival pay off her campaign debts. But the plea thus far has not yielded nearly the amounts the Clintons and their supporters had hoped for.

A Clinton spokesperson today said that the senator is not seeking relief for the $13 million she poured into her campaign. The spokesperson pointed to a June conference call, in which the New York Democrat said she considered the loan an "investment" and is not expecting anybody to help pay it back.

According to the new financial disclosure, former president Clinton gave 54 speeches worldwide last year. Many of them were given to corporate giants such as Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, General Electric and Lehman Brothers. He averaged more than $186,000 an appearance. Clinton's most lucrative payday was in the United Kingdom on Aug. 14, 2007; a group called AEG London (which operates sports stadiums and franchises) paid him $425,000 for his services.

The disclosure shows that, even while actively campaigning on behalf of his wife's 2008 presidential bid, the former president kept a hectic international schedule. Among his speaking stops: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, London, South Korea and Canada. The international talks have been the most lucrative for the former president, commanding upward of $250,000 an appearance. Over a three-day period in Norway, Denmark and Sweden in May, Clinton earned $1,485,000. The Power Within, a Canada-based motivational speaking agency, shelled out $955,000 in 2007 to have Clinton appear in Minneapolis, Toronto, Montreal and Niagara on the Lake, Canada.

After leaving the White House, Clinton turned to speaking to help settle about $12 million in legal bills accrued during his time as president. In 2006, he gave 352 speeches (nearly one a day) and earned $10.2 million (much of which the former president has donated to charity.) The number of speeches in 2007 was much lower, but appears to have been on average much more lucrative for the former president.

READ THE REST HERE.
 

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

AS AIDES MAP AN AGGRESSIVE RACE, MCCAIN OFTEN STEERS OFF COURSE
(Juliet Eilperin and Robert Barnes, Washington Post)
As Election Day nears, McCain's campaign is adopting the aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of Karl Rove, the GOP operative who engineered victories for President Bush. The campaign continued the attack Wednesday with a sarcastic television ad deriding Obama as a "celebrity," part of an intensifying effort to cast him as an elitist. But the sharp-edged approach is being orchestrated for an unpredictable candidate who often chafes at delivering the campaign's message of the day. It is that freewheeling style that has made him popular with voters and cemented his reputation for candor and straight talk. McCain, who was most comfortable as an underdog in the unscripted environment of the New Hampshire primary, makes his advisers cringe as he delivers the attack line -- and then keeps talking. In that respect, he is no Bush, his handlers say. The result is a presidential campaign that sometimes rolls between serious policy discussions about the nation's future and gotcha politics aimed at undermining his opponent's character. McCain himself is often caught in the middle, proclaiming his commitment to the former while participating in the latter.

MCCAIN'S CACOPHONOUS CABINET
(Kenneth P. Vogel, Politico)
Republican faithful have grumbled in recent weeks about the lack of a consistent message from John McCain’s campaign on key issues, leading observers to wonder what McCain’s top advisers are thinking. The answer, it turns out, could be part of the problem. Some of McCain’s most visible and engaged advisers have advanced positions that appear to conflict with the Arizona senator’s stances on hot-button topics ranging from climate change and oil drilling to tax cuts, contraception and education. Of course, it’s not unusual for politicians to seek advice from a variety of perspectives. But the ideological mishmash in McCain’s Kitchen Cabinet lends itself to questions about who’s crafting the campaign’s message and highlights the tricky policy record McCain is struggling to navigate on the campaign trail. 

OBAMA EMERGES AS MAJOR CAMPAIGN ISSUE--FOR BOTH CANDIDATES
(Bob Drogin and Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times)
With fewer than 100 days until ballots are cast, the presidential race chiefly appears to be a fierce battle to define the presumptive Democratic nominee for voters unsure about his abilities and values. "Right now, both campaigns have to do the same thing, which is establish who Barack Obama is," said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster based in Virginia. "That's the real battle going on." In trying to paint its image of Obama, the McCain camp has turned increasingly negative, even derisive. Obama, meanwhile, is still working to persuade voters to trust him enough to see him as a president, even after 18 months of largely positive publicity. Each candidate's tactics pose clear dangers, party insiders and analysts say. For Obama, the efforts to portray himself as presidential -- holding news conferences overseas, for example, or briefly using a campaign emblem similar to the White House seal -- run the risk of appearing arrogant or presumptuous... For McCain, the new and sharply negative tone toward Obama could damage the Republican's image as a maverick who rejects the attack-dog politics of traditional Washington.

MORE: McCain Tries to Define Obama as Out of Touch (Jim Rutenberg, New York Times)
Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements. The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on. Central to the latest McCain drive is an attempt to use against Mr. Obama the huge crowds and excitement he has drawn, including on his foreign trip last week, by promoting a view of him as more interested in attention and adulation than in solving the problems facing American families.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

There they go again.

In a "memo" sent to reporters earlier this afternoon, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis continues Crystal City's aggressive new anti-Obama messaging strategy by reviving the Republican Party's favorite trump card: elitism. Echoing Karl Rove's characterization last month of the Illinois senator as "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by," Davis writes that "only a celebrity of Barack Obama's magnitude could attract 200,000 fans in Berlin who gathered for the mere opportunity to be in his presence." He continues:

These are not supporters or even voters, but fans fawning over The One. Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand "MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew -- Black Forest Berry Honest Tea" and worry about the price of arugula. 

Other than the bit about celebrities fretting over the price of arugula--memo to McCain: they can afford it--there's nothing surprising about the GOP's decision to resort to this time-honored tactic. Why? Because it always seems to work. Consider Bush vs. Kerry. Hillary 2.0 vs. Obama. Andrew Jackson vs. John Quincy Adams. "Theoretically, it pigeonholes Obama as a northern liberal with effete tastes," writes the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder. "It works not because of the fact of the thing--windsurfing is not an elite sport--but because it allows partisans to feel superior and allows Republicans to begin to build an entire narrative around their opponents' purported elitism." The McCain camp wants voters to believe that Obama's "arrogance" befits his "celebrity" and makes him "selfish"--unlike (you guessed it) McCain, who always puts "Country First." Or so his slogan says.

The only problem? It makes just as much sense to call McCain an elitist as Obama. Nevermind that the Illinois senator is a bi-racial child from a broken family raised in a modest single-parent household. Or that there are plenty of "country clubs" still unwilling to accept African-Americans as members. Or that the last "celebrity" to occupy the Oval Office was Ronald Reagan, McCain's hero. Simply imagine the memo David Axelrod could send to reporters about the Republican nominee. "Only a celebrity of John McCain's magnitude could star on blockbuster television shows like '24' and appear in big-budget motion pictures like 'Wedding Crashers,'" it would read. "These are not campaign commercials or news interviews, but major Hollywood productions--which is no surprise, given that he's pals with Warren Beatty. Only celebrities like John McCain own seven homes, date Brazilian models, marry blond, jet-owning heiresses worth $100 million, ring up $500,000 a month on the family credit card, forget the last time they pumped their own gas and wear $520 black calfskin loafers by Ferragamo." Get the picture?

My point is not that both Obama and McCain are "elitists." It's that the entire discussion is asinine, and that neither Obama's protein bars nor McCain's loafers have anything to do with the business of leading a country. By the time a person decides to run for president--incidentally, a pretty elite office--chances are he or she is a) relatively wealthy and b) relatively out-of-touch with actual human beings, which is what happens when you spend most of your time around other politicians. Not only that, but running for president is by its very nature an elitist thing to do. (Is there a better word than "elitist" to describe someone who believes that he or she is best qualified to lead the free world?) Ultimately, both McCain, the war hero, and Obama, the biracial pioneer, have led extraordinary lives. That's OK. It's even desirable. Both still know hardship. Both still know adversity. Both would still bring a lifetime of trials and triumphs to the White House. If McCain disagrees, fine. He should explain why Obama--and not he--is too "elitist" to be president. But for the Republican to insinuate that exercise, organic tea and chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars somehow disqualify his opponent from serving is a disappointment. The only thing more unfortunate is that he expects the American people to buy it.

How's that for elitism?  

A few numbers worth pondering: 

FOX News Poll, July 24, 2008:
Nearly 7 in 10 Americans (67 percent) say they believe most in the media want Obama to win the November election--while a scant 11 percent think the media are pulling for John McCain. Moreover, only about 1 in 10 (11 percent) volunteers the belief that the media is neutral on the race to become the 44th President of the United States. When asked to rate the objectivity of media coverage of the campaigns, Americans feel Obama gets more of a positive spin by a better than 7-to-1 margin (46 percent more positive toward Obama; 6 percent more positive toward McCain). Just under 4 Americans in 10 (36 percent) says both campaigns are being covered objectively.

Study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, July 28, 2008:
Since the primaries ended, on-air evaluations of Barack Obama have been 72% negative (vs. 28% positive).  That’s worse than John McCain’s coverage, which has been 57% negative (vs. 43% positive) during the same time period. This is a major turnaround since McCain and Obama emerged as front-runners in the early primaries.  From the New Hampshire primary on January 8 until Hillary Clinton dropped out on June 7, Obama’s coverage was 62% positive (v. 38% negative) on the broadcast networks; by contrast, McCain’s coverage during this period was only 34% positive (v. 66% negative).

Bias, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder.

I get a lot of email accusing me of being a "liberal idiot." I also get a lot of email accusing me of being a "conservative butt boy." On Monday, for example, I was instructed to "try to not get that liberal nose of your's [sic] to [sic] close to Obama's ass" because "if McCain wins and Obama stops up short your whole head may go up to your very weak shoulders." On Tuesday another reader declared that "spineless Mr. Romano is clearly a graduate of the Fox News school of journalism."

For the record, I think there's a lot of bias in the mainstream media. It's a huge problem, in fact. But the issue isn't ideology. No reporter I've ever met sits around scheming about how to get his or her favored candidate elected. Do they have private political beliefs? I'm sure. Do these preferences occasionally skew their work? No doubt (mine included). But as a rule, reporters spend too much time with politicians to feel anything but skepticism. The really damaging bias is narrative in nature--bias for tension, bias for conflict, bias for drama. That's handy when there's actual drama--also known as news--to document. But often there isn't. Which is why the Washington Post gushes over Obama's international trip one day and pounds him for presumption the next. Or why positive coverage of Obama has declined from 62 percent in the primaries to 28 percent in the general. Ideology has nothing to do with it. No one is in control, and no one, sadly, can stop it. Despite tons of excellent individual work, this is just the way the mass media works--by constantly, collectively hyping the next plot twist, whether or not it's worth hyping.

The Internet doesn't exactly help. When it comes to campaign coverage (as I've written before) choosing scandal over substance is nothing new. But this is the first presidential election to move at the speed of the Web. Print set the pace in days; cable news, hours. Now, after years of dismissing independent political bloggers as peanut galleryists in pajamas, every major newspaper, magazine and news channel is requiring reporters to provide a play-by-play on the day’s developments at its in-house blog. Meaning we’re now stuck with a 1,440-minute news cycle. In theory, that’s dandy (no hiding); in practice, it totally skews the signal-to-noise ratio. While the demand (if not the audience) for campaign news has exploded, the supply has stayed the same (did more really “happen” in 2007 than 2003, or 1983, or 1923?). To fill the growing void, we make ever-bigger mountains out of ever-smaller molehills, 1,440 minutes a day. And the gap grows between the insight you expect and the “news” you get.

The great thing about the Internet, however, is that you can easily ignore the noise. Here at Stumper, I strive to analyze the presidential campaign without relying on ideology. I call it equal-opportunity skepticism. My approach isn't "just the facts, ma'am." We have the AP for that. Instead, I try to provide perspective--often with humor or opinion. Meaning that when I make fun of some silly thing that Obama has said, it’s because I think it was a silly thing to say--and not because I "hate" Obama. I do the same for McCain. There's no editor--liberal or conservative--telling me what to write. There's no "NEWSWEEK" demanding that I hew to some (nonexistent) party line. Nowadays, a lot of people gravitate toward media outlets that echo and reinforce their own points of view. I've always found such insularity sort of boring. I hope at least some of you--that is, the ones who aren't too busy calling me a partisan hack--agree.

Anyway, we now return to your regularly scheduled programming.
 

By Holly Bailey 

Is John McCain out of touch with... pop culture?

The Arizona senator's campaign is up this afternoon with a new ad called "Celeb," which dings Barack Obama for, you guessed it, being more of an international celebrity than a credible Commander in Chief. The ad highlights Obama's opposition to offshore oil drilling and questions his energy policies, but the real attention-getter is film of Obama juxtaposed with red carpet footage of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, a pair of Hollywood starlets who don't exactly have the most stellar reputations. Hilton, of course, briefly went to jail for drunk driving, and Spears had a widely publicized breakdown that culminated in a brief stay at the UCLA psych ward earlier this year.

So is the McCain campaign trying to equate Obama to a hotel heiress with a best-selling sex tape and a fading pop star who seems to truly dislike wearing underwear in public? Why no, the campaign innocently insists. In a conference call this morning with reporters, McCain manager Rick Davis said they included Britney and Paris in the ad only because "in our estimation" they are the two biggest celebrities in the world. "Britney is first, Paris came in second and third was Barack," Davis said. "Will people think of this as negative advertising? Look, it's the most entertaining thing I've seen on TV in a while. I wouldn't anticipate anything about this being negative."

The only problem with this argument: When was the last time Paris Hilton was on the cover of Us Weekly? Aside from a few paparazzi shots, McCain's new ad is the biggest spurt of publicity Hilton has gotten lately. After the conference call, the campaign released a memo from Davis backing up his arguments and adding a new celebrity name to the mix: Tom Cruise, whose ties to Scientology have gotten more attention than his acting roles lately. "It is beyond dispute that (Obama) has become the biggest celebrity in the world," McCain aide Steve Schmidt told reporters today. "It is a statement of fact. It is backed up by the reality of his tour around the world...The question we are proposing to the American people is this: Is he ready to lead yet?"

No surprise, the Obama campaign is attacking the ad as simply more negativity from McCain. "Oops! He did it again!" spokesman Tommy Vietor said. *Even a McCainiac agrees. This afternoon, former confidant John Weaver went on the record with Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic to call the ad a "childish" move that "diminishes" the senator. "There is legitimate mockery of a political campaign now, and it isn't at Obama's," he added. "For McCain's sake, this tomfoolery needs to stop."*

*UPDATE, 4:11 p.m.: Some smart analysis from Politico's Jonathan Martin:

The message is akin to the oft-heard line about Hilton herself: She's just famous for being famous. With Obama, the political translation is that, yes,' he's a rock star -- but does that mean you want him to lead the country?' And not just the country, but our country. It's no accident that he's called "the biggest celebrity in the world" and portrayed overseas. Nor is it incidental that he's described as being for more "foreign oil" "That's the real Obama," the ad closes.

"Celeb" represents a risk for McCain. His campaign seems to have made a conscious decision to use Obama's enormous appeal against him, with the hope that Americans will ultimately vote for the more familiar and less glamorous option. But by acknowledging Obamamania, they also reinforce the sense that the young Democrat has created an unprecedented and perhaps historic movement. It's quite a concession from somebody who himself was once a media darling and is close to a household name. They're trying to inflate Obama to tear him down -- but they also could just enhance his stature and send more buzz, money and supporters his way.

Carolyn Kaster / AP Photo

Breaking news, MSM: John McCain's presidential campaign isn't run by a bunch of morons.

Reading the political press over the past week--in which reporters have happily cataloged McCain's streak of seemingly avoidable public relations mishaps--it'd be easy to believe otherwise. The cheese-aisle press conference in Bethlehem, Penn. The bratwurst lunch alongside a used-car salesman in Columbus, Ohio. The canceled trip to a Gulf Coast oil rig. And, lest we forget, the golf-cart photo-op with 84-year-old former President George Bush in the resort town of Kennebunkport, Me. Not exactly the best way to counterprogram the images of a "young," "vigorous" Barack Obama swanning around the globe with foreign dignitaries, seducing 200,000 starstruck Europeans in Berlin and sinking three-pointers while playing pickup basketball with U.S. soldiers. "July has been a cruel month for McCain," wrote the Washington Post's venerable David Broder. "The worst week of his campaign," added Clive Crook of the Financial Times.

But Team McCain--now led by savvy Bush-Cheney veteran Steve Schmidt--may be a lot less idiotic than the chattering classes suspect. It's not just that the average polling gap between the Arizona senator and his rival from Illinois has narrowed to 2.6 percent in the wake of the latter's overseas adventure, or that 65 percent of voters say the trip left them with either a bad taste in their mouths or no opinion at all. (We predicted last week that Obama's jaunt would have little net impact.) It's that while Obama was abroad the campaign actually launched an crafty two-front ad strategy carefully calibrated to inflict maximum damage on the Dem with minimal backlash. The press may have been too focused on McCain's easily-mockable blunders to get the message. But we're willing to bet that swing voters weren't.

Here's how the strategy worked. Last week, the McCain camp released two ads. The first, "Pump," implicitly linked Obama's opposition to off-shore oil drilling--a stance that two-thirds of the country opposes--to skyrocketing gas prices. The second spot, "Troops," suggested that Obama canceled his visit to a German military hospital because "the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras." Both claims were demonstrably false. I've already called McCain's "Troops" accusation "baseless." FactCheck.org says "Pump" is "absurd."

Sadly, however, a political ad doesn't have to be accurate to be effective. Just ask John Kerry.

The key difference between the two spots is their intended targets. Currently airing in 11 battleground states, "Pump" is "a heavy hitter in McCain's rotation," according to Evan Tracey, who tracks media buys TNS Media Intelligence's Gampaign Media Analysis Group. "Troops," meanwhile, ran as a paid commercial "roughly a dozen" times, total--just enough to get make it the subject of debate (and more than a hundred free, repeat screenings) on local, national and cable newscasts. Today's New York Times called this "a public relations coup that allowed [McCain] to show his toughest campaign advertisement of the year—one widely panned as misleading—to millions of people, largely free, through television news media hungry for political news with arresting visual imagery." But when coupled with "Pump" it's something more: a way for McCain to keep the national political conversation centered on Obama's "patriotism" and readiness to lead (free of charge) while quietly reframing the debate over drilling to his advantage in a slew of key swing states (free of national media interference). As we said earlier, crafty--if not particularly ethical.

For the first month of the general election, McCain seemed to lack a coherent message. But now it's clear that he intends to sow doubts about Obama's policies, experience and trustiworthiness however he can--even by misleading voters. The point: to raise the risk factor. Reasonable people can disagree over whether this assault will work. Earlier this week, for example, we wrote that McCain's nonstop negativity risks alienating moderates originally attracted to his unique brand, and some Republicans, like former McCain guru Mike Murphy, are already saying that the campaign "should ultimately be more about what Mr. McCain would do than Mr. Obama." But one thing that's no longer up for debate is whether Team McCain is getting its "message" out--however many cheese aisles the candidate happens to find himself in. 

We'll know in November if it was worth the effort.

*UPDATE: Changed from "savvy" in the headline to better reflect the point of the piece. (The rest of the item remains unchanged.) The edit was inspired, in fact, by a witty message from reader T.L., which I've excerpted after the jump...

By Holly Bailey 

John McCain talks often about how he wants to run a "respectful campaign" against Barack Obama, but that desire apparently doesn't extend to everybody in his party. Yesterday, a group of young women not affiliated with the campaign was selling buttons outside McCain's town hall near Reno, Nev., and their inventory of mostly pro-McCain pins included some very anti-Obama memorabilia. Some of the highlights seen above: "Spell Check Says Obama is Osama;" "Join the Communist Party...Apply now at BarackObama.com;" and a button showing the hammer and sickle affiliated with communism that read "Comrade Barack Obama." Not pictured: a button boasting the slogan "Barack Obama: The Most Popular Candidate in the Middle East."
 

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

AS A PROFESSOR, OBAMA ENTHRALLED STUDENTS AND PUZZLED FACULTY
(Jodi Kantor, New York Times)
The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship. At a formal institution, Barack Obama was a loose presence, joking with students about their romantic prospects, using first names, referring to case law one moment and “The Godfather” the next. He was also an enigmatic one, often leaving fellow faculty members guessing about his precise views. Mr. Obama, now the junior senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, spent 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. Most aspiring politicians do not dwell in the halls of academia, and few promising young legal thinkers toil in state legislatures. Mr. Obama planted a foot in each, splitting his weeks between an elite law school and the far less rarefied atmosphere of the Illinois Senate. Before he outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status.

MCCAIN GOES NEGATIVE, WORRYING SOME IN THE GOP
(Michael Cooper, New York Times)
In recent days Senator John McCain has charged that Senator Barack Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign,” tarred him as “Dr. No” on energy policy and run advertisements calling him responsible for high gas prices. The old happy warrior side of Mr. McCain has been eclipsed a bit lately by a much more aggressive, and more negative, Mr. McCain who hammers Mr. Obama repeatedly on policy differences, experience and trustworthiness. By doing so, Mr. McCain is clearly trying to sow doubts about his younger opponent, and bring him down a peg or two. But some Republicans worry that by going negative so early, and initiating so many of the attacks himself rather than leaving them to others, Mr. McCain risks coming across as angry or partisan in a way that could turn off some independents who have been attracted by his calls for respectful campaigning. The drumbeat of attacks could also undermine his argument that he will champion a new brand of politics.

FIVE THINGS THE AUDACITY OF HOPE WORLD TOUR TAUGHT US ABOUT OBAMA
(John Heilemann, New York)
McCain’s annoyance with what he sees as the infatuation of the press with The One, as his campaign has dubbed Obama, has reached Hillary Clinton–esque proportions. His envy of Obama’s rock-star status is acute as well, and made all the more searing by the fact that he views his opponent as a lightweight, a line-cutter, a hypocrite, and a phony. But Obama’s voyage and the adulation it received seemed to push McCain over the edge and his campaign into a harshly negative new mode. Obama’s responses have been far from the kind of bare-knuckled rejoinders that some Democrats would like to see. (While abroad, he said he was “disappointed” that McCain had accused him of being willing to “lose a war in order to win a political campaign.”) Is it possible that McCain’s sheer awfulness as a candidate and the wanton ineptness of his operation has lulled Obama into thinking he’s got this thing in the bag? Fearful Democrats worry that it has. And they hope that his bounceless return from abroad will steel his spine for the war at home.

PRESIDENT OBAMA CONTINUES HECTIC VICTORY TOUR
(Dana Milbank, Washington Post)
Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee. Fresh from his presidential-style world tour, during which foreign leaders and American generals lined up to show him affection, Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington yesterday. He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president's) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally...  Inside, according to a witness, he told the House members, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," adding: "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions." As he marches toward Inauguration Day (Election Day is but a milestone on that path), Obama's biggest challenger may not be Republican John McCain but rather his own hubris. Some say the supremely confident Obama -- nearly 100 days from the election, he pronounces that "the odds of us winning are very good" -- has become a president-in-waiting. But in truth, he doesn't need to wait: He has already amassed the trappings of the office, without those pesky decisions.

THE UNTOUCHABLE
(Jack Shafer, Slate) 
You're welcome to believe otherwise, but I don't think the press has gone in the tank for Barack Obama. As long ago as March, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz demolished charges that the press was soft on Obama by cataloging the tough pieces published by reporters exhuming the candidate's past: his financial relationship with friend and fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who is now a convicted felon; his friendship with former Weather Undergrounder William Ayers; his casting of 130 "present" votes as an Illinois legislator; his nuclear energy compromise in the U.S. Senate, said to benefit a contributor; incendiary comments made by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright; and more. To that list add the recent critical dispatches tarring Obama as a flip-flopper... What's unique about Obama and his candidacy is that almost none of the stuff the press throws at him sticks. Nor is the press alone in its inability to stick him. Hillary Clinton hurled rocks, knives, and acid at her rival even before the primaries (see this Jake Tapper piece from ABC News) and later upped the ante in desperation. She claimed that he was unprepared to serve as commander in chief and accused him of insulting gun owners and the religiously faithful. The eleventh-hour tactics may have won Clinton votes, but they failed to undermine Obama. You could call Obama the Teflon-coated candidate, but this would miss the fact that his slickness goes all the way to the core. What has gone unexplored until now is this: How did Barack Obama achieve superslipperiness without becoming greasy?

OBAMA HAS CASH TO ATTACK MCCAIN'S BASE
(Jeanne Cummings, Politico)
In nearly every presidential cycle, candidates throw a little money at a state to try to turn it into a fresh battleground. It almost never works. But Barack Obama believes his historic nomination gives him more of an opening to press such a strategy. And what sets him apart from his predecessors is that he may actually have the money to attack his rival’s base on a broader scale and in a more sustained way than any candidate before him. The process has already begun. The Illinois senator last month began airing ads and opening offices in Virginia, North Dakota, Colorado and a handful of other states that have voted Republican in recent cycles. Obama is supplementing those high-profile moves with a potentially higher-impact investment in ground troops who can recruit volunteers, knock on doors, register voters and create a buzz around the campaign with bumper stickers and yard signs. To appreciate the aggressiveness of Obama’s operation it’s worth taking a closer look at the jockeying in Georgia... Last month, more than 20 paid Obama staffers were toiling away in the back conference room of a partially renovated law office in downtown Atlanta. And now their numbers are growing as they prepare to launch a voter registration drive that could see hundreds of thousands of African-American and young voters added to the voting rolls by November...[Meanwhile] McCain hasn’t hired any full-time field staff in Georgia and he’s not running any commercials on television there.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

By Kevin Peraino
Crossposted from NEWSWEEK's "Why It Matters" blog

Nearly a week after Barack Obama made a brief campaign stop in Jerusalem, Israelis are still shaking their heads over the aggressive reporting of their local news media. Last week the Israeli daily Ma'ariv published a photo of the prayer note Obama tucked between the stones of the Western Wall--a common tradition among Israelis and foreign tourists. "Lord -- Protect my family and me," said the note, which was written on the stationery of the King David Hotel, where Obama was staying. "Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will." (Obama's spokespeople later declined to confirm or deny that the prayer was his.)

The theft--by a student at a local yeshiva--was quickly condemned by the religious figures in charge of the wall. "The notes placed between the stones of the Western Wall are between a person and his maker," Shmuel Rabinovitz, the rabbi who manages the site, told a local radio station. "It is forbidden to read them or make any use of them." Rabinovitz and his colleagues do occasionally round up the notes to make more space, but those prayers are then buried unread on the nearby Mount of Olives. In Obama's case, the yeshiva student ultimately returned the note, but by then newspapers around the world had published its contents.

Among Israelis, ever conscious of their country's image abroad, and especially in the United States, the theft continues to generate criticism in the local blogosphere. On the Web site of the Jerusalem Post over the weekend, one reader complained that the theft was a violation of Jewish religious law and demanded a public apology. "Just hope that Obama will refrain from suing the jerk, even though he deserves it," the reader wrote. Others called for a boycott of Ma'ariv for publishing the note. Still, other Israelis dismissed the theft and view the prayer note primarily as a savvy campaign ploy. "He wrote the note knowing it may very well become public," said one. "Obama is not stupid."

In which Stumper examines the Democratic nominee's possible--and not-so-possible--vice-presidential picks. (Previous Obama installments: Ted Strickland; Jim Webb; Wes Clark; Hillary Clinton; Kathleen Sebelius; John Edwards; Joe Biden. Previous McCain installments: Bobby Jindal; Mitt Romney; Charlie Crist; Tim Pawlenty; Rob Portman.)

J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo

Name: Tim Kaine

Age: 50

Education: University of Missouri--Columbia (undergrad), Harvard University (law)

Resume: Richmond city councilman, Richmond mayor, Virginia lieutenant governor, Virginia governor

Source of speculation: How about every news outlet on planet Earth. In the past 24 hours, the entire D.C. press corps seems to have come down with a serious case of Kainemania. First, the Politico's Ben Smith and Amie Parnes reported that "Kaine has emerged as one of the campaign’s potential finalists" who "ranks very, very, very high on the short list," according to a source that " has spoken recently to senior Obama aides about Kaine." (Two "verys" was apparently too tepid.) Then the Washington Post revealed that " Kaine has told close associates that he has had 'very serious' conversations with Sen. Barack Obama about joining the Democratic presidential ticket and has provided documents to the campaign as it combs through his background, according to several sources close to Kaine." Finally, Kaine himself visited Washington radio station WTOP yesterday afternoon-- just as Obama was meeting for more than three hours with his search team --to issue the standard "I'm flattered" disclaimer and (more importantly) keep the rumor mill spinning . "My mom loves it," he said of the veep buzz."But that is for the campaign to decide." One thing Kaine didn't disclaim: whether he would serve out his first gubernatorial term (it ends in 2010).

Oh, and word is he's pulled out of a Baltimore fundraiser scheduled for tomorrow night. Which is when Obama plans to stage a barbecue in Union, Mo. Which is 50 miles from Kaine's hometown. We're just saying.

Backstory: Veepwatch enthusiasts--Stumper included--have long considered Kaine one of the leading contenders to serve alongside Obama. On Feb. 17,  2007--a mere seven days after Obama tossed his hat in the presidential ring--Kaine became the first governor outside of Illinois to endorse the lanky Land of Lincolner. Obama's first stop after clinching the Democratic nomination on June 3 was in Virginia--with Kaine at his side. What's more, the parallels between the two pols' biographies are pretty striking. Obama's mother hailed from El Dorado, Ks. (pop. 12,718); so does Kaine's. Both Obama and Kaine--and their wives Michelle and Anne--attended Harvard Law. Both worked as civil-rights attorneys before entering politics. And both went by the name Barry in high school. (Kidding about that last one.) Such similarities obviously don't seal the deal, or even play a part. But as Ben Smith notes, no coincidence is too small to escape the notice of the "symbolism-happy folks who brought you Unity, N.H."

Odds: Our CW overloads have already decided it's "now safe to say that [Kaine]'s the main object of speculation." But given that speculation requires no real knowledge of Obama's intentions--which a few reliable insiders assure me are not yet set in stone--I'm going to keep things safe and sober and say that Kaine's chances, at this point, are no better than the rest of the rumored shortlisters: Joe Biden, Evan Bayh and Kathleen Sebelius. After all, the buzz is coming from "several sources close to Kaine"--in other words, excited people with a vested interest in keeping Kainemania alive.

It's not that the governor doesn't have his strengths. He does. Of all Obama's potential partners, Kaine would probably prove the most comfortable fit--both on the trail and in the White House. Reports say he and Obama get along swimmingly. They're both relatively young. They've both styled themselves as "postpartisans." (Kaine's father-in-law is former Virginia Gov. Linwood Holton--a Republican.) Neither has spent much time mired in the muck of Washington--Kaine, in fact, has no D.C. experience whatsoever--so selling the ticket as "change" wouldn't seem like a stretch. Like Obama, Kaine is a "devout" Christian with proven experience, both personal and political, in outreach to the religious community. (Kaine spent a year on leave from law school as a missionary in Honduras--mirroring Obama's time in Indonesia--and ran in 2005 as a leader guided by "family and Christian faith." While personally opposed to abortion and capital punishment, he's publicly permissive.) Finally, Kaine is articulate, on-message and scandal-free--again, like Obama. "They will look good and make sense, much as the youthful team of Bill Clinton and Al Gore produced synergy for 1992's Democrats," writes Virginia political pundit Larry Sabato. "Even his enemies admit [Kaine] is unlikely to commit gaffes or deflect attention from the presidential nominee."

While Kaine will merely reinforce Obama's strengths in some areas, he has the potential to enhance his boss-to-be in others. First and foremost is Virginia. As I've written before, the Old Dominion is trending Democratic--Obama leads by an average of one point in the polls--and could very well break blue this year for the first time since 1964, which would probably send McCain straight to the loser's circle. Kaine--who showed in 2005 he can win in the key counties of Arlington, Fairfax and Loudon and now enjoys a 56 percent statewide approval rating--could "add a couple of points to Obama's total," according to Sabato. An added bonus: he's not only a Christian--he's a Spanish-speaking Roman Catholic. Given that he could therefore serve as a liaison to "white ethnic" Rust Belters wary of Obama and Latinos swing voters in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, that's pretty much the most convenient kind of Christian to be. Finally, Kaine has executive experience, and Obama doesn't. He's balanced budgets, worked with a Republican legislature and focused daily on the domestic issues that top this year's list of voter concerns--jobs, the economy, education, transportation, health care. When placing their bets, veepwatchers typically forget to consider how helpful the contenders will be once elected. Obama won't.

So why I am reluctant to hop on the Obama-Kaine bandwagon? Because Kaine has his fair share of drawbacks as well. Some are relatively minor. According to Virginia political experts, he's been an ineffective governor--Sabato places him in "the bottom quartile"--who "has recorded few significant successes and one giant, overriding failure in the transportation field." He's significantly less popular than mentor and predecessor Mark Warner, and it's unclear whether he could actually help deliver Virginia for Obama. His views on abortion and civil unions--he opposes both--could cause some friction on the left. If Kaine left mid-term, a conservative Republican would move into the governor's mansion--a move that could potentially allow the GOP to gerrymander the state's congressional districts. And his one moment in the national spotlight--delivering the Democratic response to the State of the Union in 2006--was a flop.

The dealbreaker, however, could be experience. Even though polls still show that voters question Obama's readiness for the role of Commander in Chief, the candidate himself is apparently uninterested in choosing a running mate solely to bolster his national-security cred. I can understand his reluctance--such a selection would likely emphasize the relative thinness of his resume while doing little to quite quiet critics' concerns. But the difference between Kaine and say, Sebelius, is that Kaine's not only a foreign-policy rookie--he's rookie, period. In fact, he's the only candidate on Obama's list--long or short--who's served less time in *major* statewide office (two-and-a-half years) than Obama himself. Reasonable people can argue over whether this greenness would hamper his vice presidency. But there's little doubt that Kaine's skimpy CV, more than any other top contender's, would help Republicans crystallize their most convincing attack on Obama--he's not ready to lead. Kaine expands the "inexperience" target instead of shrinking it, or even leaving it the same size. As the National Review's Jim Geraghty wrote this morning, Obama and Kaine "would be the most astonishingly inexperienced pair to hit Washington in modern history." Agree or not, the Illinois senator should expect to hear that line every day between now and Nov. 4 if he puts his colleague from Virginia on the ticket.

Ultimately, Obama's decision on Kaine will come down to a simple question. What's more important: conveying "change" or insulating against charges of inexperience? I have no idea how he'll answer. But I'll be watching that barbecue in Union, Mo. tomorrow night--just in case. 

*Added for accuracy, 10:33 p.m.
 

John McCain may be coming off a bad week on the trail, but at least his campaign still has a sense of humor. Here's the credential issued to reporters traveling with McCain today in Reno, Nevada. Yes, that is the cast of Reno 911.

The biggest story on the campaign trail yesterday--and by "biggest" we mean "most chewed over on cable news"--wasn't Barack Obama's economic summit in Washington, D.C. It wasn't John McCain's visit to an oil rig in Bakersfield, Calif. And it certainly wasn't the hurdles Obama is facing in his attempt to expand the black vote or the democracy group that gives GOP donors unprecedented access to McCain.

It was a piece of "mole-like skin."  

More specifically, it was a piece of mole-like skin--also referred to a "spot" and a "small little nick"--that used to reside on McCain's right cheek but no longer does. Yesterday morning, the Arizona senator, who has suffered from malignant skin cancer in the past, visited his dermatologist in Phoenix for a routine check up. The doc took a small slice of epidermis from McCain's face to be biopsied as "a precaution"--something "she does regularly"--and sent the candidate on his way with a clean bill of health. When McCain arrived in Bakersfield for the energy event, however, reporters noticed that he was wearing "a small round bandage" on his face. Hence the questions. Hence McCain's explanation. ("Melanoma is a preventable occurrence,'' he said. "That's the end of my lecture from the American Dermatology Association.") And hence the explosion of coverage, from a banner headline on Drudge to a breathless segment on Hardball to the pages of the Washington Post, where Chris Cillizza wrote that "events like today's 'mole-like' skin removal make McCain's job of convincing voters he is up to the job all the more difficult."

Such is campaign journalism in the dog days of summer.

On one hand, the MSM's fascination with McCain's epidermal escapades makes a certain kind of sense. In 2000, doctors removed a growth and more than 30 lymph nodes from McCain's face after discovering melanoma; the procedure left a noticeable scar streaking down his left cheek. Four years later, the melanoma resurfaced and was quickly removed. Given that McCain is seeking to be the oldest American--at 72 --elected to a first term as president, the public has a right to know as much as possible about his health concerns. So when he has a routine biopsy--or when his medical records are released--the press should dutifully relay the relevant information to its readers. Likewise, it makes sense that these readers are more interested in McCain's wellness than Obama's. After all, when pollsters for the Associated Press and Yahoo asked voters to name the first thing that came to mind when McCain's name was mentioned, nearly one in five said "old"--by far the most common response. In contrast, the news that Obama, 46, had a sore hip examined Sunday in Chicago was met with a collective yawn. Health matters more the older you get. No one wants a sick president. It's obvious.

The problem is that too much of the coverage crosses the line from information about McCain's condition--which, by the way, is healthy--to "analysis" of how stories about his condition affect him politically. (Those ironic quotation marks are intentional.) The typical report starts with a salacious lead announcing that McCain has had a "health scare"; continues by asking "whether the 'mole like' skin has any long term ramifications on the campaign"; chugs along with several speculative paragraphs asserting that "stories about moles and biopsies are -- at best -- not helpful and -- at worst -- decidedly harmful to McCain's chances" because "the more voters are reminded about his age, and the more doubts about his health are raised over the course of the next four months, the more pause voters will likely have about voting him into office"; and concludes by contrasting McCain with the "vigorous" Obama, who's known for "working out for 188 minutes and shooting hoops wherever he goes."

The absurd (and unsettling) thing about these dispatches (the excerpts above are from Cillizza's Washington Post item) is that instead of reporting the actual facts and letting readers react they attempt to analyze how readers will react once presented with the facts--without any evidence whatsoever that voters are actually reacting the way the author assumes they will. It's journalism in reverse. If McCain were ill, that would be one thing. But for "analyses" like Cillizza's to be credible while McCain is still healthy, they'd have to show that there's a sizable, potentially decisive group of swing voters out there who'd be happy to vote for the senator--whether on the issues, or his personality, or whatever--if only he weren't getting precautionary biopsies and reminding them that he's old. They'd have to quote John Doe of Anytown, U.S.A. saying "I agree with that McCain guy on taxes and Iraq and energy, but I'm so worried he'll die in office that I plan to vote for Obama, whom I disagree with, instead." Unfortunately, this is implausible. The fact is, McCain's a 71-year-old cancer survivor in "excellent" health, according to his doctors. Americans know that. About 45 percent are planning to vote for him; about 45 percent are not. I'm not saying McCain's age isn't an issue. Plenty of voters think it is. It's just that anyone who sees it as dealbeaker probably prefers Obama for other reasons as well.

That's the end of my lecture from the Society of Professional Journalists.

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

THE CAMPAIGN IS ALL ABOUT OBAMA
(Jonathan Martin and Mike Allen, Politico)
If you made a movie about the general election campaign so far, John McCain would be a supporting actor. Despite vulnerabilities that have kept the race closer in polls than most analysts expected--and McCain even jumped to a four-point lead among likely voters in a USA TODAY/Gallup poll released Monday--Barack Obama dominates the race by virtually any other measure. He is dictating the agenda and soaking up news coverage as McCain and his team scramble to react. “McCain is snakebit,” lamented one longtime Bush loyalist. On Sunday, New York Times columnist Frank Rich--no McCain fan admittedly--declared that Obama’s triumphant sweep through the Middle East and Europe had revealed him to be practically the “acting president.” Most political pros continue to believe the race remains within the GOP’s grasp. But two months of the five-month general election campaign are gone, and the McCain campaign – in a rerun of Hillary Clinton’s frustrations – are still searching for an effective formula for countering Obama’s appealing personality and fearsome political machine. Too often, GOP insiders grumble, McCain’s strategy seems simply reactive. On Sunday, Obama announced he’d be meeting with his economic advisers on Monday. On Monday morning, the McCain campaign announced a conference call with his economic advisers... “Tougher ads are in store for Obama this week,” according to a McCain source. “The campaign is committed to driving a sharper, more disciplined message contrast,” said an aide.

HOW BOXING EXPLAINS MCCAIN
(Michael Crowley, New Republic)
Boxing is a fitting obsession for McCain. Like the 71-year-old senator himself, the sport is a cultural throwback. A civilized way, dating to Ancient Greece, for one man to prove his strength over another, boxing was the great love of McCain's idol, the manly Teddy Roosevelt, who was partially blinded by it. But it also appeals to McCain's impish side--evoking the irascible Rat Pack style of Las Vegas he finds so appealing. (McCain is an unapologetic gambler: One acquaintance of mine tells of shooting craps past midnight with McCain in Vegas several years ago; McCain even loaned the guy's wife $50 to get her started.) In the Senate, McCain has sought to translate his love of boxing into policy. Initially, he was motivated by the grim lives of journeymen boxers, for whom he battled to win health care and pensions. "John has a real love for the sport, and it was evident," says the famed boxing commentator Bert Sugar, between drags on a cigar. "Of all the pressing problems, boxing wasn't one of them. And, yet, he devoted his time and saw it through."

BLUE-STATERS RUN THROUGH IT
(Douglas Belkin, Wall Street Journal)
While Montana's three electoral votes are hardly going to swing the election, the patterns here are taking root across the interior U.S. West, including in Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Only two Democrats have carried Montana since 1948. Bill Clinton's 1992 victory was made possible only because Ross Perot split the state's Republican vote. In 2004, George Bush won the state by 20 points. As late as this spring, the electorate seemed headed in the same direction. A pair of statewide polls showed that Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, held a comfortable lead over Sen. Barack Obama. But after four visits by Sen. Obama, an aggressive media campaign and some well-organized ground work, the Illinois Democrat now leads by five points, according to a July 1 Rasmussen poll. The campaign says it is opening six offices in the state this month. The reason for his surge lies in part with the migration of Democrat-leaning, college-educated transplants like Mr. Walseth and his wife, Elizabeth Darrow. As the rural Republican eastern plains lose population and political influence, thousands of blue-staters who began arriving here in the 1990s are reaching a critical mass. The effect is that Bozeman and several other larger towns in western Montana have become political battlegrounds.

KAINE IN 'SERIOUS TALKS' WITH OBAMA
(Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray, Washington Post)
Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has told close associates that he has had "very serious" conversations with Sen. Barack Obama about joining the Democratic presidential ticket and has provided documents to the campaign as it combs through his background, according to several sources close to Kaine. Sens. Evan Bayh (Ind.) and Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) are also being seriously vetted by the campaign staff, according to sources with knowledge of the process. Obama has revealed little about which way he is leaning. And despite rising anticipation that a decision is imminent, campaign officials said an announcement is likely in mid-August, shortly before the Democratic National Convention. Obama's top aides, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, huddled yesterday in the Washington office of Eric Holder, who along with Caroline Kennedy is vetting potential running mates. Although rumors have circulated about former military leaders and other nontraditional contenders, including Republicans, Obama's pool of prospects is heavy on longtime senators with foreign policy experience. Kaine and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius are the only state leaders believed to be under serious consideration, sources close to Obama said. Democrats who have discussed possible choices with campaign officials and have knowledge of the vetting process said others being considered include Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (Conn.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and former senator Sam Nunn (Ga.). Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Democratic Sen. Jack Reed (R.I.) are mentioned as long shots.

OBAMA-CLINTON TICKET IS SEEN AS UNLIKELY
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton abandoned her bid for the presidency and endorsed Senator Barack Obama in June, she made clear that she was interested in becoming his running mate, and Mr. Obama and his associates signaled respectfully that she would get full consideration. But there is mounting evidence that Mr. Obama’s interest in Mrs. Clinton for the post has faded considerably, if, in fact, she ever really was a strong contender to be on the ticket with him. In conversations, Mr. Obama’s advisers discuss Mrs. Clinton’s role at the Democratic convention next month in a way that suggests they are not thinking of her arriving in Denver as Mr. Obama’s running mate... The feeling goes both ways. Mrs. Clinton has told associates in recent days that she thinks there is little chance Mr. Obama will pick her and that she views the public pronouncements by some of Mr. Obama’s aides that she is under review as nothing more than a courtesy. She has not been asked to provide written documentation to the committee vetting the background of candidates for Mr. Obama. Although Mrs. Clinton probably needs less flyspecking than almost anyone else in the field — considering how long she has been in public life and how intensively her past has been examined — the silence from that corner is being taken by Mrs. Clinton’s advisers as evidence of where she stands on Mr. Obama’s vice presidential list.

HOW TO ROLL OUT A RUNNING MATE
(Jeanne Cummings, Politico)
As the two party conventions loom, Barack Obama and John McCain have a common wish: that their choice of a running mate shoves their rival out of the news, adds new complexity to the electoral map and brings a welcome spike in the polls. But both nominees-in-waiting should proceed with extraordinary care. Vice presidential picks, chosen poorly or rolled out improperly, also can quickly become public relations nightmares. The way Democratic strategist Tad Devine sees it, a running mate should have three moments: an announcement, a convention speech and a debate.  “The only other moment is when you screwed up,” says Devine, who’s had an inside seat at several vice presidential vetting processes and announcements. A look through history provides some do’s and don’ts for both McCain and Obama as they shrink their short lists and edge closer to naming their 2008 campaign trail best buds. 

Is John McCain--gasp!--beating Barack Obama in the race for the White House?

According to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll, the answer is yes. (No word yet on what the survey says about the existence of Santa Claus. [Insert rimshot here.]) Released at 2:16 this afternoon, the new Gallup numbers give McCain a 49 to 45 percent edge over his rival from Illinois. It's a remarkable result, if only for its rarity. The math is pretty simple. Since the start of April, 61 national polls have been released. Five show a tie. Fifty-two put Obama ahead. Only four--including today's, the first since the Democratic primary battle ended in early June--give McCain the lead. Over at McCain's Crystal City headquarters, we suspect that Steve Schmidt and Co. are breaking out a bottle or three of Maker's Mark--if only because the stats arrive at the perfect moment to fuel an emerging media storyline that downplays the political potency of Obama's overseas adventures by asking, as Timesman Adam Nagourney does today, "where's the bounce?" "The question is why — given how sour Americans feel about President Bush and the Republican party, and the perception that Mr. Obama is running a better campaign than Senator John McCain — the senator from Illinois is not scoring even higher in national opinion polls," he writes. And that was B.G. (Before Gallup).

Still, how should normal people--those of us who aren't paid political partisans--interpret this surprising sounding? It's a fascinating question--especially given that Gallup also released a tracking poll earlier today showing Obama enjoying his largest lead (48-40) in months. To most sane individuals, that absurd 12-point discrepancy--the polls were conducted by the same firm, after all, over the same two-day period (July 25-27)--is reason enough to refrain from putting any stock whatsoever in individual opinion surveys. This response makes some sense. (Standard disclaimer: rely on the polling averages at RealClear Politics and Pollster--which show Obama ahead by about four points overall--for a more accurate snapshot of the current state of the race.) But a closer look at today's twinned Gallup results reveals a plausible explanation for the contradiction--and may, in fact, say a lot about where the 2008 contest is headed.

The thing to remember is that the two polls were actually targeting two different audiences. While Gallup's tracking poll focused on 2,674 registered voters (i.e., anyone who answers the phone and is registered to vote) the USA Today survey homed in on a more elusive group of 791 likely voters (i.e., respondents most likely to show up on Election Day, according to "how much thought [they] have given to the election, how often they say they vote and whether they plan to vote in the election in November"). Likely voter models far from flawless, but they do help measure how voter enthusiasm may affect an election. In this case, according to Gallup polling director Frank Newport, the number of likely GOP voters was higher than in June's USA Today survey--mainly because Obama's international trip, the media's "laudatory" coverage and McCain's vigorous attacks "may have had the side effect of energizing Republicans." The result? A 10-point swing for McCain since June.

The lesson of Gallup's contradictory surveys is hardly set in stone. But one thing seems clear: McCain fares better when voters on the right are given a visceral, immediate reason to resent Obama--like his journey to Europe and the Mideast, which many saw as presumptuous--and are therefore more eager to vote. Most polls of registered voters released since June show Obama stuck below 50 percent--a reminder, says Democratic pollster Peter Hart, of the particular obstacles he faces. “Here’s a 46-year-old African American with a narrative that is very unusual and that few other Americans can relate to,” he told the Times. “Add to that the fact that he has had four years in the United States Senate and very little international experience. That’s a large leap for the American public to make.” But while some respondents refrain from voting for Obama for those very reasons, they're not always enough to inspire respondents to vote against him--which is why the same surveys show McCain mired in the low 40s with 10 percent still undecided. It's only when voters are given something polarizing to cling to--a criticism, an image, an event--that they can tilt the outcome toward the Republican nominee (as the new USA Today numbers demonstrate). Simply put, inchoate doubts about Obama won't lift McCain to victory; specific attacks may. This afternoon, I called the Arizona senator's current anti-Obama onslaught more harmful than helpful. Today's mismatched pair of Gallup polls may be an early sign that I was wrong--and that McCain won't be cutting back on the swipes any time soon.

UPDATE, 11:40 p.m.: Reader M.E. makes a smart point:

The same Gallup/USA poll had a slightly larger registered 900 voter sample that has Obama leading 47-44, which wasn't cited in your article.  By dropping 16% of Obama registered voters via the likely voter screen, with such 'unlikely' voters including first time registrants, and only 2% of McCain's registered voters, the gallup lv model gives McCain a 49-45 lead. In other words, the Gallup likely voter model decided that Obama voters were eight times more likely than McCain voters not to show up at the polls. As others have noted, this is an absurd result in an election where poll after poll has shown that greater enthusiasm is on the Democratic side.  Are likely voter models that weigh against first time voters, and in many cases also against minority voters, likely to be accurate in this election?

My answer: probably not. But the point of this post wasn't to debate the accuracy of Gallup's likely voter screen and the results it produced; there's no way to know now, 99 days from Nov. 4, who will show up to vote. (If I had to guess, I'd say that Obama has a slight lead--maybe two percent overall.) Instead, the point was to use the USA Today poll as a sort of hypothetical scenario--what would have to happen, at this point in the race, for McCain to win by four points? The answer I arrived at, reasoning backwards from the result, is that Republicans and Republican leaners have to be so revved up to vote against Obama that they turn out in droves. Otherwise--as the surveys of registered voters show--Obama wins. Which is why I suspect McCain will continue to fuel the fire.

Also: a lot of readers have remarked on my "sarcasm" in the opening paragraphs. Just to be clear, I was mocking how the media is responding to results--with shock!--not responding that way myself. I can see how this would be unclear, given that I'm a technically a member of the despised MSM myself. But I think you'll see that the rest of the item, far from being sarcastic, is actually a pretty sober analysis what this new poll--which is getting a lot of attention because it deviates from 57 of 61 released since the start of April--might mean for McCain and Obama going forward. I'm not at all surprised that this race is essentially tied.
 

By April Yee 

CHICAGO—Before democratic nominee Barack Obama spoke to hundreds of minority journalists on Sunday, two Dallas Morning News reporters made a private bet.

Holly Yan wagered 40 percent of the audience at the UNITY: Journalists of Color Inc. convention would stand to applaud Obama, though most of the 2,000 there represented media organizations that promise objective campaign coverage. Political reporter Gromer Matthew Jeffers was more cynical, putting a sandwich at stake with his 70 percent bet. As Obama met backstage with the leaders of the minority journalism associations, Jeffers and the audience waited, hushed.

Out came Obama, who with one sauntering step into the theater handed victory to Jeffers. Most in the audience (which also included civilian supporters, event sponsors and Obama's friends and family) stood and clapped. And after fielding journalists' questions—many of them critical, such as The Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Jr. on whether Obama had gone "too far" in refuting rumors he was a Muslim—Obama strolled off with another standing ovation. Audience members rushed to the rope separating the political rock star from the journalists.

Watching from afar, Yan found the enthusiasm of some of the attendees "grossly inappropriate." The decision to clap or not to clap was not merely fodder for Miss Manners. Many journalists there wondered: What kind of reception would have had John McCain? (He had also been invited to speak.) The question of objectively covering a candidate of such historial proportions has plagued reporters of this election, to the point that 49 percent of Americans polled by Rasmussen Reports now believe the press was on Obama's side. But minority journalists face additional questions on whether they can objectively cover the man who could become the first minority president--questions that, some point out, were rarely asked of women covering Hillary Clinton, or Catholics covering Kennedy.

"That mindset needs to change," said Ernest Suggs, a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists. "It is offensive that because we have the same color or the same agenda, our journalistic ethics and responsibilities go out the window."

At the UNITY convention, some journalists' compared the apparent enthusiasm of their colleagues to the coziness at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner, where the president is invited and often poked fun at. The relationship between the head of state and the press, viewed only on that night, could also be interpreted as positive, even if coverage is not.

Les Payne, a Pulitzer winner at Newsday who is black, said black journalists could cover Obama not just fairly, but also critically. "The job of the black journalist in covering Barack Obama isn't to protect Barack Obama," he said. "We have to assume then that we are not in his pocket, that we are not beholden to him, that we are not in his swoon."
 

Where's the love?

Last week, Team McCain posted a montage of media personalities fawning over Democratic nominee Barack Obama on its website and YouTube channel. Called "Obama Love," the fundraising video asked viewers to choose which song--Frank Valli's "My Eyes Adored You" or "Can't Take My Eyes Off You"--served as a more stirring accompaniment for the footage. It immediately amassed 260,000 views and rocketed to the top Unruly Media's presidential campaign viral video chart. And then, as quickly as it appeared, "Obama Love" vanished into the ether. (Or would it be e-ther?)

Turns out the music was to blame. As the good folks at Wired magazine report, the McCain campaign failed to license Valli's hits--a pricey but, alas, necessary move--and the Warner Music Group asserted its copyright claim against YouTube, eventuating the takedown. Wired notes that "it's ironic that a United States senator, who has been part of a body that has so repudiated the idea of fair-use, is feeling the repeated stings resulting from its own legislative history." But we here at Stumper headquarters think that the more interesting--and/or hilarious--story is McCain's utter inability to find a single rock star willing to associate his or her songs with the campaign.

Regular readers will recognize that this isn't the first time McCain has received the cold shoulder from the music industry. Earlier this year, ABBA nixed McCain's attempt to use "Take a Chance on Me" (a personal favorite) at his rallies. "We played it a couple times and it's my understanding they went berserk," the candidate confessed. John Hall, formerly of the 1970s band Orleans and now a Democrat­ic congressman from New York, wouldn't let McCain use “Still the One."When hardline Dem John Mellencamp learned that McCain was blasting "Pink Houses" before events, he requested that the Republican cease and desist. Shortly thereafter, McCain settled on "Johnny B. Goode" as his signature song. "It might be because it is the only one [the artist] hasn't complained about us using," he said at the time. But Chuck Berry quickly came out for Obama. While Will.i.am, Arcade Fire, the Decemberists, the Grateful Dead, Macy Gray and Wilco have personally serenaded Obama fans at campaign events, McCain's musical support has been limited to octogenarian composer Burt Bacharach and one half of the novelty country duo Big & Rich. Even the reliably Republican Ted Nugent is no fan. "McCain seem[s] to be catering to a growing segment of soulless Americans who could care less what they can do for their country, but whine louder and louder about what their country must do for them," says the Motor City Madman *(who has the same criticism for Obama)*. "That is both un-American and pathetic."

What gives? In 2000 and 2004, the twangy, evangelical George W. Bush boasted his fair share of backing bands. But nearly all of them were either Christian (Third Day, Michael W. Smith), country (Travis Tritt, Larry Gatlin, Billy Ray Cyrus) or ultra-conservative (Nugent). A relative moderate, McCain isn't particularly comfortable with any of those constituencies--and more importantly, they're not particularly comfortable with him. Now, it's not like celebrity endorsements translate into votes. In fact, the Annenberg Public Policy Center found in March that "the endorsement of presidential primary candidates by notable groups and individuals carries little weight with the public." But famous musicians can help in other ways--namely by raising money. In 2004, Bruce Springsteen, who now supports Obama, raked in more than $10 million for John Kerry with an October swing-state tour, and this April a pro-Clinton Elton John concert vacuumed up $2.5 million in one night. McCain could use that kind of cash.

What's more, a good tune coupled with a clever idea can also work wonders online--as the original "Obama Love" proved. On Saturday, the McCain campaign reposted the video, substituting a generic, sax-heavy doo-wop track for Valli's swooning, falsetto-laden classics. A Jersey boy myself, I have to admit: there was no thrill going up my leg this time around. And the crowds, in their infinite wisdom, seem to agree. So far, the revised clip has received only 9,970 views.

Ain't that a shame.

*Updated 5:32 p.m.

If you don't have anything at all to say, don't say something nice.

It's an inviolable law of presidential politics: the closer two rivals for office are on the issues, the nastier the tone of the campaign. Exhibit A, of course, was the endless Democratic primary clash between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who, as Obama once put it, "agree[d] on 98.9 percent of the issues" but still managed to spend 16 straight months fighting over the other 1.1. percent. Now it seems John McCain has found himself in a similar pas de deux with Obama on Iraq. For months, the Democratic nominee has advocated a rough 16-month timetable for withdrawal, and for months, his Republican rival has said such a schedule would amount to "surrender." That was a fertile ground for debate. But last week the White House announced that President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had agreed on the idea of a "time horizon" for withdrawing American troops, and Maliki told German newsmagazine Der Spiegel that U.S. troops should leave "as soon as possible, as far as we're concerned." "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about sixteen months," he said. "That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes." All of which forced McCain to admit, in an interview Friday with CNN, that 16 months is a pretty good timetable." In other words, vamanos.

This kind of consensus may be good for the country. But unfortunately it's bad for McCain's campaign. Without any substantive distance between him and Obama on the way forward in Iraq, the Arizona senator has chosen to indulge in recent days in a series of meaningless attacks meant create the illusion of contrast where none actually exists. First is the issue of contingency. Speaking to CNN, McCain was careful to affix an "[as long as] it's based on conditions on the ground" disclaimer to his approval of a 16-month timeline--the implication being that only he (and not Obama) will factor those conditions into his withdrawal calculus. And when Obama told my NEWSWEEK colleague Richard Wolffe Friday that the size of his residual force--which would stay in Iraq after combat troops withdraw to assist with intelligence, counterterrorism and training--would be "entirely conditions-based," McCain acted as if his rival had experienced some sort of epiphany. "Today Barack Obama finally abandoned his dangerous insistence on an unconditional withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq by making clear that for the foreseeable future, troop levels in Iraq will be 'entirely conditions-based,'" said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. "We welcome this latest shift in Senator Obama's position."

The only problem? There wasn't any shift. Truth be told, Obama has always been open to adjustments when it comes to residual forces--even if McCain thinks it convenient to claim otherwise. At a Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H. on Sept. 26, 2007, for example, the late Tim Russert pressed Obama as to whether he would have all troops out by the end of his first term. "I think it's hard to project four years from now, and I think it would be irresponsible," Obama said. "We don't know what contingency will be out there. I will drastically reduce our presence there to the mission of protecting our embassy, protecting our civilians and making sure that we're carrying out counterterrorism activities there. I believe that we should have all our troops out by 2013, but I don't want to make promises not knowing what the situation's going to be three or four years out." In other words, conditions mattered to Obama then--and they still matter now. Only the wildest partisan would believe that Obama ever planned to stick to his 16-month timetable no matter what the military brass said, no matter what was happening on the ground and no matter what sort of trouble it would create for American soldiers.

Without even this illusory policy difference to flog, McCain had to find another line of attack. His chosen course, as Politico reports this morning, is "to employ the tack many strategists see as essential and which anonymous e-mailers and commenters with no apparent links to his campaign have been practicing since last summer: hitting Obama not on his record or his platform, but on his values and person." McCain's new strategy is on full display in his latest ad, "Troops (video above), which slams Obama for, among other things, "ma[king] time to go to the gym, but cancel[ing] a visit with wounded troops" because "the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras." McCain's goal here is clear: to paint Obama as an unpatriotic troop-hater. Unfortunately, the accusation is baseless.

It's true that in Germany last week Obama went to the gym and nixed a trip to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. But any resemblance to reality ends there. Late last week, the Pentagon informed Obama that it would regard the foreign policy adviser accompanying him to Landstuhl, Maj Gen. Scott Gration (Ret.), as a campaign staffer. Worried that the visit would be seen as a photo-op, his team called it off. "The last thing that I want to do is have injured soldiers and the staff at these wonderful institutions having to sort through whether this is political or not or get caught in the crossfire between campaigns," the candidate told reporters last week. In other words, he was afraid that the political spotlight would shine too brightly on the event--not, as McCain alleges, that it wouldn't shine at all. (Landstuhl--like the Combat Support Hospital Obama visited in Iraq--was simply never on the traveling press corps' schedule.) This may expose an excess of caution and concern over appearances. But it doesn't make Obama a troop-snubber. Meanwhile, McCain spent much of the weekend sniping that his rival "would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign"--a line that Joe Klein called the most "intemperate... personal attack... I've ever heard a major-party candidate make in a presidential campaign, and the sort of thing that no potential President of the United States should ever be caught saying."

As I've written before, McCain was right about the surge, and Obama, who claimed that violence would increase, was wrong. Thanks to Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy and the simultaneous "Sunni Awakening," Iraq is far more stable today than it was in early 2007--and Obama's 16-month withdrawal plan is far more convincing now than it was then (when death squads were slaughtering 4,000 civilians a month and political progress looked impossible). Judging by his recent comments, McCain seems to concur. Which is why the conventional wisdom--"that [McCain] can make inroads with voters by keeping the focus on foreign policy issues," as Juliet Eilperin reports in today's Washington Post--may no longer reflect reality, at least when it comes to Mesopotamia. As the old disagreements over "what's next" in Iraq have largely dissolved in recent days, McCain's side of the debate has deteriorated into a slop of "I told you so" taunts, willful distortions and thinly veiled assaults on Obama's patriotism. And like any message that's mostly negative, mostly retrospective and literally unbelievable--does any objective observer really think Obama hates the troops?--the potential for backlash is big. "It's churlish and unlike McCain, and hardly will resonate with the swing voters who are going to decide this election," a leading Republican strategist told the Post this morning. "They're doing it because the candidate, and the campaign, is not happy with where they are and they're lashing out." The question facing voters this fall isn't who was right on the invasion (polls say Obama), who was right on the surge (polls say McCain) or even who has the best plan for getting out (they're virtually indistinguishable). It's who do you want to see as Commander in Chief, on TV, while we withdraw. The angrier McCain sounds, the more tempted America will be to change the channel.
 

Khue Bui for Newsweek

This week's print edition of NEWSWEEK boasts interviews with not one but two--that is, both--major party candidates for president. Since Stumper readers would never be caught dead reading articles printed on paper [shudder], we've decided to post excerpts here, in the safe, secure world of bits and bytes. Suzanne Smalley's chat with John McCain is first; Richard Wolffe and Barack Obama is after the jump.

JOHN MCCAIN by Suzanne Smalley

Smalley: You value straight talk.
McCain: I'll give you that.

Some of your proposals seem a little gimmicky, like the $300 million prize for inventing a new, more powerful car battery. If someone were capable of inventing it, wouldn't they have done it already?
You could argue tax cuts could be viewed as a gimmick; anything we do for people to encourage American entrepreneurs and innovators could be viewed as a gimmick. And I don't view it as a gimmick. I view it as an incentive to address one of the most important challenges Americans face today, and that is to become energy-independent and to have automobiles that they can drive without having to be bankrupted.

You've advocated for lifting a ban on offshore drilling. Why is drilling there preferable to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?
Because the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I believe that offshore drilling is clearly called for. I think we need to do it, and we have to do it.

You've taken heat lately for a string of misstatements about foreign-policy issues. Some news reports have suggested your age could be slowing you down. How do you explain those gaffes?
I spend most of my days with town-hall meetings and with people—people like you. And occasionally there will be a misstatement. But you know, at a town-hall meeting I've never had a person stand up and say, "Hey, Senator McCain, you've made a gaffe." They stand up and they say, "How do I stay in my home? How do I keep my job? How do I afford to drive to work?" Et cetera. And, by the way, some of those "gaffes" have not been [misstatements], but they've been portrayed as such. But I'm not complaining. It's fine with me. The American people know me.

On torture, why should the CIA be treated differently from the armed services regarding the use of harsh interrogation tactics?
Because they play a special role in the United States of America and our ability to combat terrorists. But we have made it very clear that there is nothing they can do that would violate the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits torture. We could never torture anyone, but some people misconstrue that who don't understand what the Detainee Treatment Act and the Geneva Conventions are all about.

What should our policy be toward gays who want to serve in our military? And would your decision be influenced at all by the needs of commanders on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially with more soldiers needed?
Obviously, we listen to our commanders on the ground, who are in charge and have a responsibility for those young men and women. They say that "Don't ask, don't tell" is working, so unless they recommend otherwise I'm certainly going to support their recommendations, which were originated with Gen. Colin Powell.

Do you think that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is a tool of Vladimir Putin? And if our ally Georgia is threatened or attacked by Russia, how would you respond?
Well, I can't get into hypotheticals, but I can tell you that ... the relationship between Medvedev and Putin is unclear, but it certainly is disturbing, the trend of their behavior towards their neighbors, including their failure to cooperate with us in face of the Iranian nuclear buildup.

How do you plan to win the votes of women? What policies can you point to that will help you win their support?
Job creation is one of their No. 1 issues, and education and equal opportunity. I have not only a very clear record, but I have a very clear vision to restore our economy, to create jobs and particularly small businesses and to protect America for their sons and husbands and friends and cousins and [family] members, men and women, who are serving in the military.

Are you worried being pro-life will drive them away?
The majority of women in America, in my view, respect the rights of the unborn.

AFTER THE JUMP: Richard Wolffe interviews Obama...
 

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

MCCAIN TAKES AIM AT OBAMA'S CHARACTER
(Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin, Politico)
As Senator Barack Obama traveled overseas, the campaign against him appeared to take a decisive new turn with Senator John McCain zeroing in on his Democratic opponent’s character. In a year when polls show an easy victory for a generic Democratic candidate, McCain has until now been loathe to employ the tack many strategists see as essential and which anonymous e-mailers and commenters with no apparent links to his campaign have been practicing since last summer: hitting Obama not on his record or his platform, but on his values and person. The Democrat’s Achilles’ heel in this model is an inchoate sense among some voters that the new arrival on the national stage with the unusual biography—and who’s the first black nominee from either party—isn’t American enough. Prior to Obama’s trip overseas, though, McCain had instead employed, without appreciable effect, a more conventional critique of his opponent as an ordinary politician, a “flip-flopper,” and, of course, a liberal.

100 DAYS TO GO
(Susan Page, USA Today)
In the time before Nov. 4, running mates will be chosen and platform skirmishes fought, economic reports released and as many as one-third of votes cast early by absentee ballot and at registrars' offices. Will more U.S. troops be pulled out of Iraq? Could a so-called October surprise be sprung, by calculation or catastrophe, that reshapes the campaign's close? Both campaigns are acutely conscious of the passage of time. At Barack Obama's headquarters in Chicago, a countdown calendar hangs just outside campaign manager David Plouffe's office. The same count appears on white boards throughout John McCain's headquarters in a Virginia suburb of Washington. The momentum and intensity of the campaign builds almost every day as you approach the election," says Tad Devine, a strategist for Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. "You spend a lot of time planning for the events you know about, and you spend a lot of time reacting to the events that just happen."

MR. PRESIDENT? NOT QUITE, BUT PRESIDENTIAL
(Mark Leibovich, New York Times)
Senator Barack Obama has stood before a lectern adorned with a faux presidential seal. Senator John McCain recently began giving a radio address every Saturday. Mr. Obama’s campaign plane has been nicknamed O-Force One. (Obama-’08/President is stitched into the captain’s chair.) Mr. McCain gave a speech in Columbus in May hypothetically looking back on his first term in office. It is unclear when the two presidential candidates will hold their first state dinners, spend their first weekends at Camp David or welcome this year’s N.B.A. champions, the Boston Celtics, to the Rose Garden. Oh, wait, neither of these guys has been elected yet. It can be easy to overlook this detail given that Mr. McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Mr. Obama, of Illinois, his Democratic counterpart, have been assuming the trappings and behaviors of already-elected presidents. Candidates always strive to project an image consistent with the office they are seeking. But in McCain vs. Obama — the first general election matchup in 56 years that will not include a sitting president or vice president — two senators with minimal executive experience seem to be falling all over themselves to playact the role of president.

FOREIGNERS
(Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker)
There has been much discussion of whether it will prove politically advantageous for Obama to have addressed a mile-long crowd of two hundred thousand happy Berliners in the golden early-evening sunlight. Berliners are Germans, and Germans are foreigners, and since well before John Kerry was demonized for knowing how to speak French it has been axiomatic that heartland Americans don’t like foreigners piping up about our elections, however much brainland Americans may disagree. Obama gained nothing in the polls during his nearly flawless, arguably triumphant grand tour. Still, after seven years during which, even among our closest allies, contempt for Bush bled into resentment of the country that returned him to office, one would have to be an awful grouch not to be gratified by the sight of a sea of delighted Europeans waving American flags instead of burning them and cheering an American politician instead of demonstrating against one.

EMBRACED OVERSEAS, BUT TO WHAT EFFECT
(Dan Balz, Washington Post)
By almost every measure, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's overseas tour that concluded here Saturday was a clear success, with meticulously planned and deftly executed events designed to beam back images to the United States of a politician comfortable on the world stage. What isn't measurable is whether it worked. Will a week of one-on-one meetings with foreign officials, cheering crowds, favorable and voluminous media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic and plain good fortune on the debate over getting out of Iraq overcome the doubts he faces at home about his readiness to be president? And if it doesn't, what will?... Obama's assessment is that the payoff from one of the most ambitious foreign trips ever undertaken by a presumptive nominee could come much later. "The value to me of this trip is, hopefully, it gives voters a sense that I can in fact -- and do -- operate effectively on the international stage," he said. "That may not be decisive for the average voter right now, given our economic troubles, but it's knowledge they can store in the back of their minds for when they go into the polling place later." 

FOR OBAMA, HURDLES IN EXPANDING THE BLACK VOTE
(Alec MacGillis and Jennifer Agiesta, Washington Post)
At the heart of the Obama campaign's strategy is a national effort to increase registration and turnout among the millions of Democratic-inclined Americans who have not been voting, particularly younger people and African Americans. The push began during the primaries but expanded this month to a nationwide registration drive led by 3,000 volunteers dispatched around the country. Gaining greater African American support could well put Obama over the top in states where Democrats have come close in the past two elections, and could also help him retain the big swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan. If 95 percent of black voters support Obama in November, in line with a recent Washington Post-ABC News national poll, he can win Florida if he increases black turnout by 23 percent over 2004, assuming he performs at the same levels that Democratic candidate John F. Kerry did with other voters that year. Obama can win Nevada if he increases black turnout by 8 percent. Ohio was so close in 2004 that if Obama wins 95 percent of the black vote, more than Kerry did, he will win the state without a single extra voter. But an increase in overall black turnout could help offset a poorer performance among other voters. The push has also raised Democrats' hopes of reclaiming Southern states with large black populations, such as Georgia and North Carolina, where low turnout among voters of all races has left much more untapped potential than in traditionally competitive states such as Ohio.

DEMOCRACY GROUP GIVES DONORS ACCESS TO MCCAIN
(Mike McIntire, New York Times)
Over the years, Mr. McCain has nurtured a reputation for bucking the Republican establishment and criticizing the influence of special interests in politics. But an examination of his leadership of the [International Republican Institute, a democracy-building group he has led for 15 years]— one of the least-chronicled aspects of his political life — reveals an organization in many ways at odds with the political outsider image that has become a touchstone of the McCain campaign for president. Certainly the institute’s mission is in keeping with Mr. McCain’s full-throated support for exporting American democratic values. Yet the institute is also something of a revolving door for lobbyists and out-of-power Republicans that offers big donors a way of helping both the party and the institute’s chairman, who is the only sitting member of Congress — and now candidate for president — ever to head one of the democracy groups. Operating without the sort of limits placed on campaign fund-raising, the institute under Mr. McCain has solicited millions of dollars for its operations from some 560 defense contractors, lobbying firms, oil companies and other corporations, many with issues before Senate committees Mr. McCain was on.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

Image via Bild.de 

Given recent reports, Barack Obama might want to alter his campaign slogan from "Change We Can Believe In" to "No Sweat." A timeline:

April 29, 2008: Obama scrimmages with the UNC-Chapel Hill men's basketball team. Despite huffing and puffing as he attempts to keep up with players 25 years younger and seven inches taller than him--“These guys move very fast,” he tells a reporter--Obama, according pool photographers covering the game, doesn't perspire. "[We] didn't see [him] sweat," the stunned lensmen later tell Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson. The Iceman cometh.

July 16, 2008: In Chicago, Obama manages to make three separate stops at two Chicago gyms in the course of a single day, exercising for over three hours and arriving at the East Bank Club "dressed casually as if going out to dinner, wearing slacks, a blue blazer and flip-flops." The most miraculous detail, according to the AP?  The senator displayed a "distinct lack of visible sweat." Noticing a pattern, Stumper imagines the metaphorical possibilities: "You heard it here first, folks: the Obamacle does not secrete water and chlorides through his epidermis. He has no need for thermoregulation. Ever. Basketball. Vice presidential interviews. Whatever. He's like a walking block of ice. That never melts. Or a giant stick of antiperspirant."

July 25, 2008:  At 4:02 p.m., Obama strides into the gym of the Ritz Carlton hotel in Berlin, Germany, turns on his iPod and begins to pedal on a stationary bike before deciding he'd rather lift weights instead. Fortunately, Judith Bonesky, a reporter for the German tabloid Bild, is there to witness his iron-pumping prowess. First, Obama does 30 curls, right and left, with 35 lb. weights--then, after sipping from his Evian, tacks on an additional 10 with the 75 lb. barbells. Surely this is enough to coax some moisture from his pores? But no. As the senator is about to leave, Bonesky asks, “Mr. Obama, could I take a photo?” “Of course,” he answers. Smiling, Obama puts his arm across the reporter's shoulder. She slides hers around his hip. At which point she discovers the cold, dry truth. "Wow," Bonesky reports. "He didn’t even sweat!"

Next up: Obama lifts a 3,000 lb. Nissan Altima off of an injured pedestrian in Columbus, Ohio--without stopping to mop his brow.

Seriously, though. We understand the symbolic value of this physiological quirk, Senator. But when things quiet down, you might want to get examined by a medical professional.
 

 

McCain with Ridge, near right, and Pawlenty, far right. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Barack Obama and John McCain disagree about plenty of things. Iraq. Taxes. The best time to vacation in Berlin. Now, judging by the available evidence, we have to add yet another rift to the list: how they plan to pick their vice presidents.

Asked about internal matters, Obama's staff is famously tight-lipped. So it came as something of a surprise on June 25 when campaign manager David Plouffe told a gaggle of D.C. reporters something--anything--about what the Illinois senator is looking for in a running mate. Obama will select someone "qualified to be president and someone who'll be a partner in governing," said Plouffe. Geographical convenience--as in, will he or she help him swing a state?--won't come into play.

It's one of the oldest questions in the veep-vetting book: can a running mate really deliver his home state? By disregarding what many experts consider a key VP criteria, Obama was signaling his electoral confidence. I'm doing well enough, he seemed to say, to base my choice on "principle," not pragmatism. McCain, however, doesn't have the same luxury. In fact, looking at his shortlist--former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former U.S. budget director Rob Portman and former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, according to today's Washington Post--it's clear that only one thing unites the contenders: the fact that none of them would be in contention for anything if they hailed from, say, Idaho.

Take Romney, for example. His business acumen is impressive. He's an able and willing attack dog. But it's no secret that McCain--who, for politician, places an unusual premium on personal relationships when deciding who to trust--destested him during the primaries. Not to mention that his flip-flops on social issues have alienated both Christian conservatives and crossover voters. So why has Romney's stock steadily risen inside the campaign--and why has McCain gushed about him on the trail? Because (as we've noted before) he's a proven vote-getter in Michigan who could possibly swing the state's 17 electoral votes into the Republican column for the first time since 1988. Now, according to Bob Novak's upcoming column, McCain's internal polling agrees. "Private polls show Romney could make all the difference in Michigan," he writes. "A McCain-Romney ticket carries the state by a moderately comfortable margin. With any other running mate, McCain loses Michigan.” Voila.

Romney at least seems like a credible president. Portman and Pawlenty? Not quite. McCain has said that he's "aware of the increased importance" of his veep pick "given [his] age" and will therefore select "someone who can take [his] place immediately." But even though Portman and Pawlenty have their charms--Portman's an economic whiz who ran the OMB under President Bush; Pawlenty's blue-collar persona appeals to right-wingers and centrists alike--neither would strike McCain as ready for the Oval Office if he were, say, running in the Republican primaries. Portman, 55, has never been elected to executive office; Pawlenty, 47, has only served one full term as governor. It's clear that Minnesota (where McCain trails by two in the latest poll) and Ohio (where he's behind by less, on average) are their most persuasive attributes. Same goes for Ridge. Unlike Portman and Pawlenty, the former congressman, governor and Homeland Security director is undoubtedly ready for the gig; unlike Romney, he's close to McCain. Problem is, he's also a pro-choice moderate. Given McCain's existing issues with the religious right--a large segment of the GOP base--the prospect of flipping Pennsylvania, where he currently lags by eight, is probably the only thing keeping Ridge in the mix.

Is McCain foolish to rely so heavily on geographical convenience? Historians would say yes. As every dust-caked, tweed-clad presidential scholar loves to point out, no veep pick since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 1960 single-handedly swung a decisive state for his boss. But we happen to think McCain is on the right track. For starters, the only reason LBJ was the last VP to swing a decisive state is because JFK was the last nominee to select his partner with that express purpose in mind. In 1968, Nixon suspected he would lose Maryland, despite Agnew's presence on the ticket, and while Muskie helped Humphrey win Maine, it wasn't nearly enough to win the election. In 1976, Mondale's home state of Minnesota was already leaning blue; Dole's home state of Kansas was already solidly red. Dukakis didn't expect Lloyd Bentsen to deliver Texas. John Edwards was hardly Kerry's best bet for a map changer. A son of the South, Clinton would've won Tennessee with or without Gore. And Geraldine Ferraro, Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman didn't even come from swing states. Which is why it can't hurt for McCain to make the effort.

The truth is, the Arizona senator will not win in November without Ohio--and winning will be very difficult without either Michigan, Minnesota or Pennsylvania as well. The math is simple. Obama is currently leading in every state that Kerry won in 2004. They're worth a total of 251 electoral votes. In addition, he also holds slim advantages in the Bush states of Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, Indiana and Montana. Of those 74 electoral votes, Obama needs a mere 19--Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, for example--to claim victory. The only way McCain can compete is by either a) holding his rival to fewer pickups or b) picking up some electoral votes of his own. Ohio would help accomplish former. Michigan, Minnesota or Pennsylvania would help accomplish the latter. Ultimately, putting a Ridge, a Romney, a Portman or a Pawlenty on the ticket won't guarantee a McCain victory on Election Day. But it may be his most realistic shot.

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.
 

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.

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

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 paid 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.
 

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. 
 

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.
 

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.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

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. In effect, Obama is using McCain's attack to reinforce his candidacy's "change our politics" theme.

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.
 

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.

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."
 

When the Democratic nominee announced his massive $52 million June fundraising haul last week, we here at Stumper headquarters were struck by one number in particular: $68. That according to the campaign, was the month's average contribution's size. The amazing thing, we wrote, was that it was about $30 lower than the average contribution in May, April or March. Which implied one thing: "that the senator attracted a massive number of new $5, $10, $20 donors once the primaries ended--presumably from the ranks of devoted Dems who had (until then) supported Hillary Clinton." In other words, the much-hyped rumors of Clintonites refusing to accept Obama as their nominee were greatly exaggerated--or simply, you know, inconsequential.

Now that Chicago has filed its finance reports with the FEC, though, we decided that instead of just (ahem) guessing, we should actually quantify how much Clinton's former supporters gave. Given that the headlines say stuff like "Clinton Supporters Lend Obama a Big Fundraising Hand," we assumed that the stats would confirm our suppositions. They don't. Truth is, according to the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, Obama received only $1.8 million in June from donors who'd given to Clinton since January 2007.*** That sum represented a paltry 3.5 percent of his monthly total and less than a tenth of what Clinton herself raised in April--hardly enough to account for the $30 million leap in Obama's fundraising from May (the last month of the primary season) to June (the first month of the general election). Moreover, about half of the $1.8 million came from 355 Clinton donors contributing more than $2,000 apiece--which kind of makes our whole hypothesis (i.e., Obama attracted a massive number of small-sum donors from Clinton's base) look dubious. Overall, only 2,200 Clinton donors--out of the hundreds of thousands who contributed to her campaign--sent their first checks to Obama last month.***

At first, this may look like a minus for Obama--you know, another opportunity for pundits to proclaim that he's yet to unify the party. But raising more than $50 million without overwhelming contributions from former Clinton donors is actually more impressive--and more encouraging for the future of Obama's money machine--than relying on them to reach that lofty mark. Here's why. For one thing, it means that many of those $5, $10 and $20 checks--the checks that lowered June's average contribution to $68--came from folks who may have sat out the Democratic primary but are now eager defeat McCain. Going forward, the sustained growth of this small-sum base is by far Obama's biggest advantage over his Republican rival, who's relying mostly on major moneymen to max out and move along. More importantly, Obama's sans Hillary June success indicates that there are still a ton of Clinton contributors--that is, proven Democratic donors--who have yet to give to the party's presumptive nominee. For Obama, this is a win-win situation. He's already shown that he can raise plenty for his purposes with minimal Clinton input. The worst that can happen is that some of her donors continue to hold out--and he continues to rake in $52 million a month. On the other hand, if old tensions thaw as November approaches and more Clintonites open their checkbooks--a likely scenario--the nominee's already astronomical totals will climb even higher.

***UPDATE, 2:13 p.m.: Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor calls to remind me that donations under $200 aren't listed on the FEC returns--insert palm slapping forehead here--so we can only really assess how well Obama did with Clintonites in the $200 to $2,300 category. (Unfortunately, I based my analysis on the L.A. Times and Washington Post reports, which were written, misleadingly, to sound as if Obama attracted only 2,200 Clinton donors overall.) This means that there are still potentially--and, in fact, probably--a sizable number of former Hillary supporters (certainly more than 2,200) who sent Obama their first small checks in June, as I wrote last week. Either way, the end result is same for the senator: he's likely to go up from here.
 

Suzanne Smalley files this report from the McCain roadshow:

John McCain may not be the shoot from the hip maverick of old, but he hasn’t lost his sense of humor. After a long day of loading on and off buses and planes, a press wrangler tonight told reporters the campaign had a “surprise” gift, adding that it is one that campaign officials, at least, consider “pretty funny.” With that, the staffer walked down the aisle and handed out laminated press ID cards emblazoned with the words “McCain Press Corps JV Squad” underneath a photo of the Statue of Liberty. The caption? “Left behind to report in America.” The reverse side of the ID offered a French translation of the same text along with a picture of a beret wearing pseudo-Frenchman pouring a glass of wine. Mon Dieu!

The “gift” was the latest in a succession of not so subtle hints that the McCain camp is displeased with the coverage of Barack Obama’s foreign trip. With Obama earning largely positive reviews abroad, McCain spent today fighting back. The Arizona senator slammed his rival for opposing the surge in troops that McCain famously backed when it wasn’t politically popular to do so.  He ridiculed Obama for never having met David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, before this trip. And he suggested that Obama must not understand what is happening in Iraq since he is refusing to acknowledge recent success there. But even with his campaign’s increasingly well-honed message, the Arizona senator has faced difficulty waging the debate on his terms. As the situation in Iraq improves, most Americans are focused on their desire for the war to end, a discussion that favors Obama. That reality, however, hasn’t stopped McCain from trying to redefine the conversation.

“This is a clear choice the American people have,” McCain told a crowd of about 400 gathered at a town hall meeting in Rochester, New Hampshire yesterday afternoon. “I had the courage and the judgment to say that I would rather lose a political campaign then lose a war. It seems to me that Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” The inclusion of the phrase “in order to” sparked much chatter amongst the press corps traveling with McCain, who sit in town hall meeting after town hall meeting, often without hearing anything discernibly different. McCain’s words yesterday in New Hampshire—the state is in many ways a second home to the Arizona senator, having twice brought McCain’s political fortunes back from the dead—clearly represented a ratcheting up of his rhetoric. Add to the mix newly leaked reports of a McCain veep pick this week and it’s hard not to conclude that the McCain camp has an aggressive strategy for staking its claim to this news cycle. (Conservative columnist Bob Novak is on record saying he feels “used” by what he now thinks was a deliberate ruse by the McCain camp to gin up buzz for their candidate by leaking him bad information about McCain announcing his vice president this week. The alleged tactic comes as McCain’s team openly gripes about what they view as a media juggernaut bolstering Obama’s prospects with fawning coverage of his foreign trip).

You can’t blame the McCain camp for battling hard on many fronts. McCain can’t afford to cede any ground to Obama this week. According to recent polls, McCain is well ahead of Obama when it comes to voters’ perception of who is a stronger commander in chief. But McCain’s advanced age, lack of speaking polish and admitted weakness on the economy make it especially critical for him to maintain his edge on national security issues. To that end, McCain spoke extensively about Obama’s opposition to the surge yesterday. “My opponent said the surge would not succeed, that he wanted us out. If he had had his way we would have been out last March, we would have never done the surge, we would never have succeeded, and we would have had defeat,” McCain said at the town hall meeting, which was held inside a small opera house in downtown Rochester. Expect McCain to continue flogging the same message today when he takes advantage of Obama’s absence by barnstorming through the key swing state of Pennsylvania, with stops scheduled in Wilkes-Barre, Allentown, and Bethlehem.

For reporters on McCain’s plane the message discipline has its downside. McCain’s schedule has been tightly controlled with little of the freewheeling access that was once the norm. A small group of national reporters rotate covering press availabilities that are largely dedicated to answering questions from local reporters. Much of the senator’s time is also spent raising money. Yesterday a plane full of reporters flew to Baltimore solely so the senator could attend a fundraiser. Except for a small group of pool reporters, the press corps whiled away the evening at Mo’s Fisherman’s Seafood Factory, where the jumbo lump crab cakes were as big as baseballs. Some days may be slow, but at least they know how to feed us.
 

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

ALL HAIL 'MCBAMA'
(Thomas Friedman, New York Times)
McCain was right about the surge. It has helped to stabilize Iraq and create a better chance there for political reconciliation. But Iraq has always been a story full of surprises. And one of the most important political surprises is how quickly the surge has made Iraq safe for Barack Obama’s foreign policy — and for the election policy of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Do not believe for a second that there was any mistranslation when Maliki blurted out to the German magazine Der Spiegel recently that Obama’s withdrawal timetable for U.S. combat troops from Iraq — 16 months after the next U.S. president is sworn in — “could be suitable.” Maliki was quite specific: “Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.” He was speaking a deep truth: the modicum of stability produced by the surge has changed the political dynamics of the Iraq story... More and more mainstream Iraqi politicians believe they are able to run their own affairs, and fewer and fewer mainstream Americans believe we are able to devote another presidency to Iraq... So McCain, who called the surge right, may get little credit, because the story now is about post-surge Iraq. McCain’s post-surge view — which also may be right — is that Iraqis still do not have the military force capable of protecting their homeland and need more U.S. help in nation-building. Meanwhile, Obama, who was not a surge supporter and simply stuck to his 16-month withdrawal timetable, finds himself — by luck or smarts — in perfect harmony with the post-surge mood in Iraq. His timetable may be too short, but Obama can worry about that later.

OBAMA TOUR STAGED FOR POLITICAL POP
(Carrie Budoff Brown, Politico)
Democrat Barack Obama doesn’t travel light. Halfway around the world, the Obama campaign machine appears as sprawling and seamless as it is on its home turf. As the presumptive Democratic nominee tours five countries in five days, he brings an entourage that would make a pop star envious. A dozen top foreign policy advisers are either traveling with Obama or doing ground work ahead of his arrival in each country. This group is supplemented by his usual contingent of almost a dozen traveling aides, including chief campaign strategist David Axelrod and communications director Robert Gibbs, and too many advance staff to count. With layers of Secret Service agents, they zipped through Amman Tuesday in a motorcade of 20 vehicles. The mix of policy and political advisers reflects the split dimension of the senator’s tour through Europe and the Middle East: Even as his closest aides insist that the trip is a fact-finding and relationship-building mission, Obama’s every step is being intricately managed to maximize political advantage.  From the saturated media coverage to the one-on-one meetings with heads of state, the trip already had a White House feel. The scope of the traveling staff simply adds to an aura of a president-in-waiting.

MCCAIN'S UNHAPPY WARRIOR
(John Dickerson, Slate)
John McCain attacked Barack Obama both at home and abroad this week. One attack was smart. One wasn't. On Iraq, McCain pressed Obama over his opposition to the troop surge—the strategy that has reduced violence in Iraq and led to modest political gains for the al-Maliki government. This was smart. The topic is on McCain's issue turf, potentially puts his opponent at odds with the American generals who executed the surge, and makes Obama look like a hidebound pol who won't absorb new facts that contradict his predetermined conclusions. McCain's dumb attack came in a television ad that blamed Barack Obama for high oil prices. You might have thought the cause of the oil-price hike was war, SUVs, OPEC, speculation, and global demand for oil. Nope—it's Obama. By this standard, he should also answer for the Starbucks closings and the dent in my Honda. McCain is attacking too much and indiscriminately. The barrage undermines his brand, takes time away from telling voters what he might do for them, and looks awfully old-timey in a year when voters want a new brand. He should go on the offensive, yes, but in targeted forays.

MCCAIN'S MESSAGE GETS A MAKEOVER
(Laura Meckler and Elizabeth Holmes, Wall Street Journal)
As his campaign bus rolled through northern Wisconsin recently, John McCain interrupted a conversation to take a cell-phone call. It was "Sgt. Schmidt," he reported -- his nickname for Steve Schmidt, the sharp-tongued strategist he recently drafted to take over the campaign. In the past few weeks, Sen. McCain has largely put his fate in the hands of Mr. Schmidt, who met with the candidate after a widely ridiculed campaign event on June 3 -- the same night Sen. Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination and the general election effectively began. The campaign had to get its act together.

IS MCCAIN'S AGE SHOWING?
(Howard Kurtz, Washington Post)
We interrupt the nonstop coverage of Barack Obama's overseas trip to bring you some breaking whispers about John McCain. He has been making a series of verbal slips -- invariably described as "gaffes" -- that are starting to ricochet from liberal blogs to the mainstream media. And fairly or not, some critics are suggesting the 71-year-old Republican candidate is showing his age. McCain referred to the "Iraq-Pakistan border" in a "Good Morning America" interview; since there is no such border, he must have meant Afghanistan-Pakistan. He has twice referred to Czechoslovakia, a country that ceased to exist in 1993; mixed up Sunnis and Shiites; and identified Vladimir Putin as president of Germany. Aides to the Arizona senator dismiss the missteps as meaningless, noting that their man is far more accessible to journalists than Obama. "When you engage with reporters from 8:30 a.m. till 8 at night, you're bound to make a gaffe," says McCain communications director Jill Hazelbaker. "People are yearning for the kind of president who takes tough questions, and that's who John McCain is."... The question is fair, says veteran analyst Charlie Cook of National Journal. "People wonder if McCain is kind of like a pitcher seven or eight years past his prime and misses a few here and there," he says. "When you're about to turn 72, people are going to be watching to see if you're slipping."

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

My NEWSWEEK colleague Richard Wolffe reports from Obama's overseas entourage (watch for additional dispatches throughout the week): 

Standing opposite the Roman ruins of a Temple to Hercules, Barack Obama did a public high-wire act on Tuesday: undertaking to answer a week's worth of complex foreign policy questions without making any campaign-threatening stumbles.

The press conference atop the ancient Citadel in Amman, Jordan, was Obama's first session with the press since he flew to Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq last week. In the last four days, he has enjoyed at least two measures of good fortune that have helped him stay on course.

First, the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, effectively endorsed Obama's 16-month timeframe for withdrawing from Iraq, suggesting the end of 2010 as an end-date for U.S. troops to leave. Maliki's office half-heartedly tried to backtrack on that support for a similar timeline, under pressure from the White House, but then wound up talking anew about a date certain. His interjection makes it much harder for McCain to argue that Obama's withdrawal plan is reckless.

Second, Obama got some priceless photo ops-alongside Gen. David Petraeus on a helicopter tour of Iraq, and eating alongside the troops in the Middle East. Those images give Obama ammunition to use in combating one of John McCain's major criticisms of the Democratic contender-that he lacks the foreign policy experience necessary for success in the White House.

But those advantages didn't prevent Obama from looking wobbly once in awhile. He was pressed repeatedly by Jordanian reporters about his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ahead of his travel to Jerusalem and Ramallah on Wednesday. When asked about U.S. support for Israel, Obama intended to send a strong message that the United States would remain supportive of its ally. Instead his response came out this way. "Well let me be absolutely clear. Israel is a strong friend of Israel's," he declared. "It will be a strong friend of Israel's under a McCain administration. It will be a strong friend of Israel's under an Obama administration. So that policy isn't going to change."

Obama's most challenging question, asked in several different formulations, was about his approach to the commanders on the ground in Iraq. If the commanders, especially Gen. Petraeus, told him this wasn't the right time to leave Iraq, would he ignore them?

"In his role as commander on the ground, not surprisingly, he wants to retain as much flexibility as possible in terms of accomplishing that goal," Obama began. "What I emphasized to him was, you know, if I were in his shoes, I'd probably feel the same way. But my job as a candidate for president and a potential commander in chief extends beyond Iraq."

Obama repeatedly dodged the question. Instead of a choice between listening to Petraeus and taking his own advice, Obama spoke about the competing demands on a commander-in-chief: whether it would be more pressing to send more troops to Afghanistan or spend more money at home.

Seated beside him in the searing heat and dust were his two travel buddies, Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.). The two will not be traveling on to Israel and Europe; going forward, Obama exits the military aircraft (used as part of a congressional fact-finding tour) and takes a seat aboard his newly-repainted campaign plane.

But the bipartisan duo's presence in the battle zone helped to underscore Obama's call for the U.S. to move beyond political conflict-especially where national security is concerned. "Regardless of who becomes the next president, Democrat or Republican, I think we're all going to have to strip away the ideology, we're going to have to strip away the politics," Obama said. "The issues are too serious, and reality is reasserting itself."

Obama's balancing act won't get any easier as he heads to Israel Tuesday night. McCain has done his best to try to step on Obama's publicity; the Republican, mindful of the fact that a sizable chunk of the campaign press corps is paying special attention to his rival this week, has been pounding Obama for saying that if he had it to do over again, he would still oppose the Bush administration-backed surge. And McCain's camp has even let flower rumors that he may be on the verge of picking a vice-presidential candidate this week-a move that would certainly spin the spotlight back McCain's way.

READ THE REST HERE.
 

In a June 7 strategy briefing (above), John McCain campaign manager Rick Davis rattled off a list of states that his boss was well-positioned to win: California, Michigan, Wisconsin, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, most of McCain's advantages have vanished since Barack Obama cemented his status as the Democratic nominee. In California, Obama leads by an insurmountable 17.6 points; in Connecticut, he's up by 20. But that's no surprise--after all, John Kerry won both states by huge margins in 2004. What is surprising is that Obama is actually outperforming Kerry in 2004's closest contests--ten points better in Wisconsin; six points better in Pennsylvania; and six points better in Ohio. With the exception of New Hampshire--arguably McCain's second home--only one state on Davis's list actually represents a real map-changing opportunity at this point in the race: Michigan. In fact, a poll released yesterday shows Obama ahead by a mere two points, 43 to 41.

Could McCain really win the Great Lakes State, which has voted Democratic in every election since 1992? And if so, how?

The answer to the first question is maybe. If McCain hopes to win in November, he'll need a pickup in Michigan to offset likely losses in Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado. "We can expect to see lots of Dearborn-to-Toledo bus tours for the Straight Talk Express," writes Patrick Ruffini. In July polling, the Arizona senator trails by an average of five percent--which is slightly smaller than the gap between Bush and Kerry exactly four years ago. Over at Fivethirtyeight.com, FOS (Friend of Stumper) Nate Silver predicts that McCain has a 31 percent chance of victory--his best odds in any of the blue states listed as "Lean Obama." And undecideds, according to the latest EPIC-MRA poll, view the Republican more favorably than his rival: 58 percent to 51 percent. If McCain wins, experts say, it will be a combination of character--i.e., his image as a "maverick warrior" appeals to the state's unique blend of urban blue-collar types and rural outdoorsmen--and circumstance: thanks to a defunct Democratic primary, Obama didn't campaign in Michigan from July 2007 until May 2008 and is still (strangely enough) a somewhat unknown quantity on the ground. McCain, meanwhile, has visited 40 times since January 2007 (including a trip to the GM plant in Warren last Friday) and outraised Obama locally. Naming former rival Mitt Romney as his running mate--a choice that could come as early as this week--could very well boost McCain's bid in Wolverine Country, where Romney's father was governor and the family brand is strong. Which may be why Romney is rumored to top McCain's shortlist.

But not all Michigan news is good news for the Republican. In fact, the last EPIC-MRA poll, taken in May, showed McCain leading by four points--which means that Obama has gained six since capturing the nomination and making his first stops in the state (10 in all since May 14) in nearly a year. According to Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio, this could mean that McCain's head start is disappearing and that Obama--who's already blanketing the state with ads and plans to visit several more times before November--still has plenty of room to grow. "What we've seen now [in the surveys] is a shift towards Obama -- not a huge shift, a subtle shift," Fabrizio said. "The question now is whether that trend continues." If it does, McCain is probably doomed. But for now, Michigan remains his best shot at a pickup.
 

Everyone knows Barack Obama is confident. After all, he occasionally refers to himself in the third person. "Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama's been there," he once said. He often tells voters that he is "imperfect," which presupposes that they need reminding. And oh, right--he decided to run for leader of the free world after serving less than two years in the U.S. Senate. Most people, I think, expect anyone crazy enough to want the presidency to regard himself highly. But as "The One" bedazzles Europe and the Mideast this week, the question that Republicans want reporters and readers to ask is whether he's crossing the line into cockiness.

To that end, the RNC has created a new email alert--complete its own illustrated banner--called "Audacity Watch." The first message went out this morning. Its headline: "Senior Obama foreign policy adviser: Obama is President of the United States." The email then goes on to relay this exchange from Politico's latest dispatch: 

"[Berlin] is not going to be a political speech," said a senior foreign policy adviser, who spoke to reporters on background. "When the president of the United States goes and gives a speech, it is not a political speech or a political rally."

 "But he is not president of the United States," a reporter reminded the adviser.

The reporter, of course, has a point: Obama is not president of the United States. But I'm going to bet the candidate is aware of that--even if his advisers sometimes forget (especially when they're bragging about big rallies in front of foreign landmarks). Audacity rating: mild.

That's not say, however, that Obama is audaciousless. The senator's more interesting remark, actually, came during his Sunday morning interview with CBS correspondent Lara Logan in Afghanistan (video above). Asked if "the trip [was] partly aimed at overcoming.... doubts among some Americans that you could lead the country at war as commander in chief from day one," the Illinois senator delivered a curious response. "The objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to ten years," he said. The funny thing is not that Obama expects to get elected to two terms instead of one--not unusual, really--but that he seems to suggest that his second term (which, by any traditional measure would end on Jan. 20, 2017) could extend an additional sixteen months until July 2018, which would require changing either the Constitution or the laws of space and time. If that's not audacious, I don't know what is.

Still, Obama did make sure to remind the first reporter he saw after departing Friday from Chicago that "we have one president at a time." So at least we're all clear on that.

UPDATE, 4:49 p.m.: More Obama "presidentiality" from the Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown:

Obama aides were reminded by reporters--for the second time today--that he isn't in the White House yet, and therefore they can't invoke White House rules and traditions.

An unpaid foreign policy adviser (who worked for Clinton) told reporters that he never in his four years in the White House had go on the record for a briefing. Several reporters retorted that they weren't in the White House.

By Holly Bailey 
(Item originally posted July 21, 10:18 p.m.) 

Is John McCain going to announce his vice presidential running mate this week? The political world is all atwitter this evening about a Bob Novak item posted late today suggesting that McCain is readying a surprise announcement of his veep pick in hopes of sucking all the oxygen out of Barack Obama's trip overseas. Is it going to happen? Two words: Who knows? McCain's not talking--nor are any of his small circle of senior staff who are actually involved in the selection and have long said they won't discuss in any way, shape or form the VP process.

But let's look at the clues: McCain tomorrow is holding a town hall near Mitt Romney's vacation home in New Hampshire, and reporters on the trail this week with McCain have been put on notice that there might be an additional event tomorrow. Key word there: "might." In other words, OMG! Now if the rumor mill is to be believed, Romney is near the top of McCain's list--indeed, the former gov even gets namechecked in the aforementioned Novak item. Could McCain possibly show up tomorrow in New Hampshire with Romney, his former foe, and announce they are not only close friends but now running mates? Anything's possible. The setting, after all, would be special for McCain--New Hampshire is the state that raised the onetime underdog's campaign from the dead, not once but twice. And, bingo, McCain would probably lead the evening newscasts tomorrow. Not a bad scenario for a campaign openly frustrated with the news media's fascination with Obama's trip overseas. But hold your horses, we have another suspicious stop on the itinerary. Over the weekend, McCain's campaign announced a late addition to the senator's schedule this week: a quick trip to New Orleans. There, McCain is set to meet with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, another oft-mentioned veep possibility. Cue the buzz machine!

Is anything going to happen this week? The only people who really know aren't talking. But even if McCain holds off on his announcement, his campaign does score something of a message victory, in that all the ramped up speculation on the senator's intentions is keeping the focus on him. In other words, the head fake, if that's what it is, might just accomplish part--if not all--of what actually naming a running mate could do for McCain this week, in terms of coverage. While McCain himself hasn't said much about his veep search--except for that he won't talk about it--it is worth noting that he told reporters on his plane in March that he wouldn't mind waiting to see who Obama picks before naming his own running mate. Is that strategy still operable? Stay tuned.

Read Stumper's take on Romney as veep here and here; for Jindal, click here.
 

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

FOR OBAMA, A FIRST STEP IS NOT A MISSTEP
(Richard A. Oppel, Jr., and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
The Iraqi government on Monday left little doubt that it favors a withdrawal plan for American combat troops similar to what Senator Barack Obama has proposed, providing Mr. Obama with a potentially powerful political boost on a day he spent in Iraq working to fortify his credibility as a wartime leader. After a day spent meeting Iraqi leaders and American military commanders, Mr. Obama seemed to have navigated one of the riskiest parts of a weeklong international trip without a noticeable hitch and to have gained a new opportunity to blunt attacks on his national security credentials by his Republican rival in the presidential race, Senator John McCain. Whether by chance or by design, the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq chose a day when Mr. Obama was in the country to provide its clearest statement yet about its views on the withdrawal of American troops. After a weekend of dispute about precisely what Mr. Maliki was suggesting, his spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, told reporters in Baghdad, “We cannot give any timetables or dates, but the Iraqi government believes the end of 2010 is the appropriate time for the withdrawal.”

OBAMA'S UNPRECEDENTED TRIP
(Dan Balz, Washington Post)
A veteran of former president Clinton's administration, someone who understands both politics and foreign policy, described this week's seven-nation trip as one of the four most important events for Obama between now and Election Day -- the others being his selection of a vice presidential running mate, his convention and his debates with McCain. What struck this person was the boldness of Obama's decision to spend more than a week abroad in the middle of a campaign. Not, of course, for the reasons Obama outlined, but no less an example of Obama's self-confidence. "This is a big-league move to directly address a concern that the American people are going to have" about his candidacy, he said. What is striking is how Obama's campaign differs from past Democratic campaigns. In earlier years, Democratic candidates couldn't wait to move off of foreign policy and onto domestic issues, aware that their party more or less owned the domestic debate, while Republicans generally held the high ground on national security. The more time they could spend focusing the contest on domestic issues, the better their chances of winning. That was true certainly for John F. Kerry against President Bush four years ago, and it's clear that the polls currently show that national security issues are McCain's one key area of strength against Obama. Obama's advisers believe the economy will dominate the fall campaign, but the candidate shows no indication that he will try to avoid engagement with McCain over foreign policy. The journey Obama began when he left Washington last Thursday is one wholly unique in the annals of presidential politics.

OBAMA'S IRAQ MISSION
(E.J. Dionne, Washington Post)
To win the presidency, Barack Obama needs only to battle John McCain to a tie on foreign policy and national security. That means Obama has no need for a great triumph during his trip this week to the Middle East and Europe. His goal is to look safe, sound and competent, and that's how he's playing things. More and more, 2008 is taking on the contours of 1980. Then, the country, desperate for change after the battering it felt it took during Jimmy Carter's term, was eager to vote for a new direction and a charismatic leader. But Ronald Reagan was inexperienced in foreign policy. Some of his past statements made swing voters worry that he might blow up the world -- or so Carter's strategists tried to get voters to think. The election stayed close until the final days. The key moment came in the campaign's single one-on-one debate. Carter may have prevailed on debating points but Reagan was the real winner because he came off as cool, calm and likable, and that was sufficient. In the week that followed, the bottom fell out on Carter. Obama is in an analogous situation. The country is at least as fed up with Bush as it was with Carter. Polls suggest that if Bush were on the ballot this year, Obama would sweep the country. The race is closer against McCain, who does not inspire the same rage and hatred Bush does. So Republicans hope that voters might yet find their way to voting their doubts about Obama.

A STRATEGY FOR MCCAIN
(Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review)
The good news for Republicans is that Obama can be beaten. The bad news is that the McCain campaign has embarked on a course that — although it has some of the right elements — seems likely to fail. McCain would be most comfortable running in accord with his particular notions of political virtue while emphasizing character, national security, and a few pet causes such as earmarks. If he wants to win, he has to leave his comfort zone. He should take a page from Hillary Clinton. She did not, of course, defeat Obama, but she road-tested a strategy that cost him support among crucial constituencies — and that strategy is even better suited to McCain’s general-election run than it was to her primary campaign... Once Clinton went after Obama in earnest, she came back. She surged on the strength of her “3 a.m. phone call” ad, which ran prior to the Ohio and Texas primaries and argued that she was better suited than the neophyte Obama to handle a crisis. And she rolled up her post-February wins on the basis of lunch-bucket appeals to working-class white and Hispanic voters. For a contemporary Democrat, Hillary ran a center-Right campaign; she talked of blowing Iran to smithereens, downed shots of Crown Royal, and appealed frankly to blue-collar whites. Many of these tactics had little substance, but they conveyed a sense of toughness that endeared Hillary to her voters and highlighted a vulnerability of the polished but aloof and fragile-seeming Obama.

IS THE MEDIA TRYING TO ELECT OBAMA?
(Dee Dee Myers, Vanity Fair)
It’s not surprising that voters, particularly those of the Republican persuasion, think the media is more or less in Obama’s pocket. A recent survey by Rasmussen found that 49 percent of the likely voters they talked to believed that reporters would favor Obama in their coverage, while just 14 percent said the same about McCain. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans thought the press would try and help Obama win, while only 21 percent of Democrats thought journalists were in bed with McCain. Complaints about bias are only exacerbated when the New York Times (the bête noire of the right) rejects an opinion piece written by McCain comparing his position on Iraq to Obama’s—just days after the Times ran a similar piece by Obama. Suspicions of pro-Obama bias began in the primaries. A Pew survey in late May and early June found that 37 percent of Americans believed that Obama received preferential coverage; only eight percent said the same about his principal opponent, Hillary Clinton. There are lot of “explanations” for the lopsided coverage: Obama is new and what’s new is “news.” As the first African-American to run a serious race, let alone win a major party’s nomination, Obama is running an historic campaign. Obama has created a “movement,” and Americans are simply more interested in him than in his opponents. Obama is running a smarter campaign, and he knows how to court media attention. It’s also true that intense media coverage is a double- edged sword: the attention is great when things are going well, but it can doom a candidate if and when things start to go badly. And so far, Obama has had way more good days than bad days. Each of those rationales is largely true—and somewhat less than satisfying.

 
Thaier al-Sudani / Getty Images-pool

Here's a dispatch from Larry Kaplow and Lennox Samuels in Baghdad: 

Sen. Barack Obama got a red-carpet greeting in the Green Zone. The Democratic presidential contender, who was in Baghdad Monday, was seated one-on-one with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at the end of his marble-lined salon, while Obama's senate colleagues sat at the side with the aides. But the greatest gesture of Iraqi hospitality came just after Obama and the Americans had zipped off in their convoy of armored SUVs. Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told a scrum of the assembled press that the Iraqi government hopes U.S. combat troops can go home by the end of 2010 – perhaps leaving advisers and trainers behind. It puts the Iraqis' schedule – or at least in their publicly-stated preference—close to the mid-2010 date that Obama has proposed. And it is a timeline–something the Bush administration has opposed until just last Friday, when it allowed that a "time horizon" might be plausible.

Maliki aides brushed off questions about whether the date was discussed by the prime minister and the presidential contender during their talks. Also sitting in the meeting were key administration figures on IraqU.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and top adviser for Iraq David Satterfield, as well as Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and Democratic Senator Jack Reed, D-RI. But the 2010 timeline seemed to catch embassy staff off guard later as they called back to verify the comment when NEWSWEEK requested an American response. They could be expected to be a little frustrated. Maliki's office had spent much of the weekend trying to clarify his stand on troop withdrawals after a German magazine reported that he endorsed Obama's timeframe – an apparent break with President George W. Bush, who has been a staunch Maliki supporter.

There's growing support within Maliki's Shiite Muslim constituency for a timetable on a U.S. departure as the government seeks to consolidate power without interference from outside. But Maliki surely also realizes that, for now, he relies on American backing—most recently seen in March with the crucial support U.S. troops gave his forces when they faced tough fighting the southern city of Basra. Maliki could also be hedging his bets in case Obama is the next president.

Either way, perhaps it's no surprise that Obama strode out of the hour-long meeting with Maliki calling it "a very constructive discussion." The candidate made no other comment at the time but was expected to do a television interview later tonight—perhaps the only in-depth exchange he will have with media while on the Iraq leg of this week's Middle East and European tour.

READ THE REST HERE.  
 

Click the image for an interactive graphic on Obama's trip. 

Also from the print edition of NEWSWEEK: leading pundits from the countries he'll visit—and three more he should—offer suggestions for the future. I've posted a few below; click here for the rest.

1. Germany: Too Much Hope
By Josef Joffe

For Barack Obama, the good news is also bad news: if he ran in Germany today, he would win by a landslide, with 67 percent of the vote. Why is this bad news? Because hell hath no fury like a nation disenchanted, to borrow from the old English play "The Mourning Bride."

Germany's Obamamania has disappointment written all over it, for two reasons. One is President George W. Bush. Somehow, the chattering class has decided that W is a cross between a demon and a dolt, a one-man Axis of Evil with a room-temperature IQ. Hence the derision and the contempt they direct at him; hence, also, a scapegoat fantasy that confuses the man with his country. Once we finally pack off Bush, so the wishful thinking goes, we will be able to love America again.

Alas, Germany's and Europe's problems with America run a lot deeper than that. W is just shorthand for overweening power; it's Mr. Big and not Mr. Bush that irks the European soul. It is power liberally used—and not, as in Iraq, always used with the say-so of the lesser players. It is America as a league of its own, a giant who will not reflexively submit to the dictates of goodness by which Europe (give or take Britain or France) now lives. At any rate, anti-Americanism is older than Bush, and it will outlive him. In fact, it will last as long as the United States remains No. 1—the world's steamroller of might and modernity.

The second source of disillusionment will be Obama himself. Once inaugurated, the Savior & Redeemer will be president of the über-power that is the United States. He will be more multilateralist than was Bush in his first term, and he will speak more softly. But he will still carry the biggest stick on earth. Germans might want to read the foreign-policy chapter in Obama's book "Hoffnung wagen" ("The Audacity of Hope"). There are paragraphs in there that are pure Bush doctrine. On pre-emption: "We have the right to take unilateral military action to eliminate an imminent threat to our security." On American power: "There will be times when we must again play the role of the world's reluctant sheriff. This will not change—nor should it."

Obama can change the tune of U.S. foreign policy. But he can't get rid of the brass and the kettledrums, so when he visits, he might gently prepare Berlin for the dissonances to come. Such as when, for instance, the next president asks Berlin for more combat troops in Afghanistan, where the Bundeswehr would rather drill wells and build schools.

Joffeis publisher-editor of Die Zeit in Hamburg. His latest book is"Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America"(2006).

2. Iraq: Time to Go
By Ali A. Allawi

It's natural that Barack Obama should see Iraq through the prism of U.S. involvement there and its implications for America's domestic affairs. But that can't be the basis for building a new U.S. policy. The turmoil that has engulfed Iraq for nearly 50 years has deeply scarred the Iraqi people. We have suffered from wars, mass expulsions, genocidal killings and sanctions—and, most recently, from the chaos that followed the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed and millions have become refugees.

Obama should realize that the picture of Iraq he'll get from meetings with military commanders, U.S. diplomats and senior Iraqi leaders will be incomplete, offering him only a glimpse of the country's true conditions. It's true that there have recently been salutary developments on the security front. The levels of violence and instability are well below the dark days of 2006 and 2007. But the convulsions of the post-invasion period aren't over, and represent a continuation of a pattern that has bedeviled Iraq for a long time. That pattern features misgovernment, wasted resources and difficulties reaching a consensual political framework. The invasion of Iraq basically destroyed the old Iraqi state. And the new order is now being held hostage to factional politics and power grabs. The country is being chaotically and venally administered by remnants of the old bureaucratic class in partnership with returning exiles. The Iraqi security forces—the Army, national guards, tribal levies and police—have improved security, but it's unclear where their loyalties lie. If the new order fails to improve conditions soon, Iraqis may well turn once again to proverbial "men on horseback."

Iraq's citizens yearn for a normal, dignified life. They are a fiercely proud people and will not accept the long-term presence of foreign troops. Iraqis do not want to be party to agreements that could create tensions and drag them into conflicts with their neighbors. It's therefore time to refashion the U.S. presence in Iraq. Washington should adopt a policy of "constructive disengagement." This will require changing the focus of the American-Iraqi relationship, away from military and security issues and toward political and economic ones. Troop levels should be rapidly drawn down. The United States should then concentrate on supporting Iraqis as they build a fair and representative political order, and should help us create the institutions and policies needed to underpin it.

Allawi served as Iraq's minister of Finance from 2005 to 2006 and is the author of "The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace."

AFTER THE JUMP: What's next in Afghanistan...
 

SPC Jeff Cole, 21, takes a break at a small outpost in eastern Baghdad / Photo: David Botti

Over at Checkpoint Baghdad and Soldier's Home, my fellow NEWSWEEK bloggers Larry Kaplow (our Baghdad bureau chief) and David Botti (a Marine-turned-embedded-reporter) just filed dispatches on what the soldiers and citizens in Iraq think of Barack Obama, who arrived in the country this morning and will spend the day meeting with commanders on the ground. Both reports are fascinating. I've included excerpts below, but I encourage you to click through and check out the blogs in their entirety.

1. WHEN OBAMA COMES MARCHING OVER
(David Botti, Soldier's Home)
For U.S. Army soldiers at a small outpost in the Beladiat section of eastern Baghdad, hardly anyone even knew he was coming.  Until three weeks ago they were without Internet access.  Two months ago, back at their main base, a deadly rocket attack knocked all of the flat screen TVs off the mess hall walls, leaving them with no television.  And even if they do have a moment to check on the status of the presidential campaigns, no one here gives it much of a thought. "When I'm not doing anything for the Army, I'm trying to sleep," said twenty-year-old PFC Cory Kenfield, who pointed out he's been deployed in Iraq for most of the campaign season.  

In fact, by the time these soldiers return home (the newest rumor is January or February), the United States may already have a new president – and a new policy on Iraq. Until then it’s business as usual. Over the past few nights the soldiers have been involved in two raids on suspected militia members.  They’ve installed a new air conditioner for their spartan living quarters.  They’ve found themselves disciplined by their platoon sergeant, and made plans for an upcoming re-supply. The biggest news on this particular day seemed to be that a coffee shop opened back at their main base to replace the one damaged by a deadly rocket attack in April.

After hearing of Obama's intended arrival, some said they simply didn't care about politics.  Others, like 21-year-old Specialist Jeff Cole, didn't see how it would affect their day-to-day lives as a platoon of infantryman partnered with a unit of Iraqi National Police. "It's good for his campaign, but it doesn't really matter for us," he said. Cole, like most of his other comrades, followed up his answer with a question of his own: “where’s Obama going to be in Iraq?”  If Obama's visit were to have any impact on the troops, the soldiers all agreed, it would depend on where in Iraq he goes.   "He'll probably go to the Green Zone and say he hung out with the troops.  When really all he'd be doing is hanging out with mechanics and colonels," PFC Cory Kenfield said of the general absence of infantry troops in the Green Zone. "If he actually comes out here with us, I'll just laugh," chimed in eighteen-year-old PFC Daniel Mullineaux, as he grabbed a water bottle from a refrigerator that barely cools.

Sergeant Eric Chan joked that the only reason he’d go see Obama speak was if the speech were actually given in the comparatively posh and safe Green Zone, far away from the garbage-strewn lots, half-built houses, and perpetually barking packs of stray dogs that comprise the platoon’s area of operations.  Chan, a wiry 25-year-old veteran of Afghanistan on his first tour in Iraq, saw Obama’s visit as being more meaningful for the folks back home.  “To the people in the States I think it's a good thing to see a possible future president come out here,” Chan said.  “It's good for future leaders to see what's going on – to see what they're not used to.  It's like, being a leader you’ve got to step up, and he's stepping up.”

Further up Charlie Company’s chain of command, First Sergeant Brian Disque also saw Obama’s visit as being primarily a opportunity for the candidate to educate himself. “When I hear certain peoples’ interpretations of what’s going on in Iraq, it concerns me,” Disque said. The first sergeant figured once Obama gets to Iraq, and sees the types of progress being made here, the senator may have to take back some of his criticisms of the war – a move Disque thinks could make him look like a flip-flopper.

No matter where Obama ends up in Iraq, or what he actually says, none of the soldiers saw the visit as something to give more than a passing thought.  Sergeant Mario Garcia, who was born and raised in Ecuador, said because of that country’s own political problems he’s developed a mistrust of all politicians. Then the 25-year-old paused for a moment. “I guess it's good for Obama to see how much progress is in Iraq right now,” Garcia said quietly.  “Maybe he'll say: 'alright it's time to get these guys outta here.'”

Botti served as a Marine in Iraq in 2003. He returned last week as an embedded reporter and is blogging about the changes in the country at NEWSWEEK's Soldier's Home.

AFTER THE JUMP: Larry Kaplow on what Iraqis think of Obama...

Obama's latest foreign-policy ad, "American Leadership" 

He's been called a naive idealist. But in terms of foreign policy, he's the true realist in the race. Or so says my NEWSWEEK colleague Fareed Zakaria. Excerpts:

The rap on Barack Obama, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been that he is a softheaded idealist who thinks that he can charm America's enemies. John McCain and his campaign, conservative columnists and right-wing bloggers all paint a picture of a liberal dreamer who wishes away the world's dangers. Even President Bush stepped into the fray earlier this year to condemn the Illinois senator's willingness to meet with tyrants as naive. Some commentators have acted as if Obama, touring the Middle East and Europe this week on his first trip abroad since effectively wrapping up the nomination, is in for a rude awakening.

These critiques, however, are off the mark. Over the course of the campaign against Hillary Clinton and now McCain, Obama has elaborated more and more the ideas that would undergird his foreign policy as president. What emerges is a world view that is far from that of a typical liberal, much closer to that of a traditional realist. It is interesting to note that, at least in terms of the historical schools of foreign policy, Obama seems to be the cool conservative and McCain the exuberant idealist... 

Obama talks admiringly of men like Dean Acheson, George Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr, all of whom were imbued with a sense of the limits of idealism and American power to transform the world. "In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative," wrote Larissa MacFarquhar in her profile of him for The New Yorker. "There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It's not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good."

As important as what Obama says is what he passes up—a series of obvious cheap shots against Bush. He could bash him for coddling China's dictatorship, urge him to boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics or criticize his inaction in Darfur. In fact, Obama has been circumspect on all these issues, neither grandstanding nor overpromising. (This is, alas, not true on trade policy, where he has done both.)

Perhaps the most telling area where Obama has stuck to a focused conception of U.S. national interests is Iraq. Despite the progress in Iraq, despite the possibility of establishing a democracy in the heart of the Arab world, Obama's position is steely—Iraq is a distraction, and the sooner America can reduce its exposure there, the better. I actually wish he were somewhat more sympathetic to the notion that a democratic Iraq would play a positive role in the struggle against Islamic extremism. But his view is certainly focused on America's core security interests and is recognizably realist. Walter Lippmann and George Kennan made similar arguments about Vietnam from the mid-1960s onward.

Ironically, the Republicans now seem to be the foreign-policy idealists, labeling countries as either good or evil, refusing to deal with nasty regimes, fixating on spreading democracy throughout the world and refusing to think in more historical and complex ways. "I don't do nuance," George W. Bush told many visitors to the White House in the years after 9/11. John McCain has had his differences with Bush, but not on this broad thrust of policy. Indeed it is McCain, the Republican, who has put forward some fanciful plans, arguing that America should establish a "League of Democracies," expel Russia from the Group of Eight industrialized countries and exclude China from both groups as well.

Obama's response to McCain's proposals on Russia and China could have been drafted by Henry Kissinger or Brent Scowcroft. We need to cooperate with both countries in order to solve significant global problems, he told me last week, citing nuclear-proliferation issues with Russia and economic ones with China. The distinction between Obama and McCain on this point is important. The single largest strategic challenge facing the United States in the decades ahead is to draw in the world's new rising powers and make them stakeholders in the global economic and political order. Russia and China will be the hardest because they are large and have different political systems and ideological approaches to the world. Yet the benefits of having them inside the tent are obvious. Without some degree of great-power cooperation, global peace and stability becomes a far more fragile prospect.

Obama and McCain are obviously mixtures of both realism and idealism. American statesmen have always sought to combine the two in some fashion, and they are right to do so. A foreign policy that is impractical will fail and one that lacks ideals is unworthy of the United States. But the balance that each leader establishes is always different, and my main point is that Obama seems—unusually for a modern-day Democrat—highly respectful of the realist tradition. And McCain, to an extent unusual for a traditional Republican, sees the world in moralistic terms.

READ THE REST HERE.
 

Obama's weekend travels, via the AP 

Hi all,

Thanks to an extracurricular NEWSWEEK assignment--namely, a story I'm writing for the dead-tree edition of the mag--I won't be able to match my usual pace of three or four blog items today. In their place, however, I've lined up some great stuff: an essay by Fareed Zakaria on Barack Obama's foreign-policy vision; dispatches from a soldier and reporter in Iraq on how Obama is going over on the ground; advice from leading experts in the countries he's likely to visit; and perhaps an item or two from Holly Bailey with McCain and Richard Wolffe with Obama. Stay tuned for more. I'll resume my regular blogging duties tomorrow.

Best,
Andrew
 

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

THE AMAZINGLY SUPERFICIAL RACE
(Noam Scheiber, New Republic)
This past week has brought endless chatter about all the potential pitfalls and opportunities Obama faces. For the life of me, I'm having trouble identifying the former. Yes, a gaffe would be damaging amid all the glare. But so much more damaging than a gaffe at home? It's not like Obama's comments on the campaign trail don't already attract incredible scrutiny here and abroad... More to the point, there won't be many opportunities for gaffes. Gaffes generally require a modicum of spontaneity. And the Obama expedition, far more so than the typical campaign appearance, is being stage managed to the extreme. Obama will be hauled in and out of meetings, as he was this weekend in Iraq and Afghanistan; he will wave alongside foreign leaders; he will pose before iconic vistas. But the words will be kept to a minimum, and when they're offered, they will most likely be offered to American reporters--like the three network news anchors all scrambling for face time. "It's not a knowledge quiz. It's more visceral than that," Richard Haass, a top former Bush State Department official told Time last week. "Americans need to have a sense that this person can hold his own." Translation: These trips are about atmospherics, with the foreign locales serving as sophisticated props.

MORE: Obama Asserts His Americanness (Ben Smith, Politico)
Barack Obama will appear this week before the American public in a new role: as an American abroad. And he's putting the stress squarely on "American." In a presidential campaign where the Democrat faces an especially intense variation of a familiar Republican assault — that he is, in some sense, not "one of us," the trip abroad represents an opportunity for Obama to assert that he is, rather, not one of them. 

THE BLAIR EFFECT: HERO ABROAD, LIABILITY AT HOME
(Sarah Baxter, London Times)
If Britain and Europe could vote, he would win the White House in a landslide. A poll in The Guardian last week showed that Obama would trounce John McCain, his Republican rival, in Britain by a margin of five votes to one. France and Germany are even more ardent members of Obamaland. Obama has been called the “black Kennedy” by a Berlin newspaper. Der Spiegel has run a cover feature on “The Messiah factor . . . and the yearning for a new America”. Le Monde has proclaimed, “Obamamania has spread to France”. Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford, has compared the phenomenon with Dianamania. In America, however, Obama is struggling to convince voters that he is The Chosen One. While he is supported abroad by almost everybody from French communists to German greens and plenty of British conservatives, his victory at home is far from assured.

MCCAIN IS ODD MAN OUT ON 'TIME HORIZON'
(David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
It may not sway many voters, but on Friday, as Barack Obama embarked on an extended trip abroad intended in large part to relieve concerns about his commander in chief bona fides, the terms of debate on Iraq began a dramatic shift that appears to favor his candidacy. President Bush, who’d been opposed to any timetable for removing American forces from Iraq, reached an agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to set a “general time horizon” for a withdrawal.  “It’s a devastating blow to the McCain campaign — not just that Maliki moved to Obama’s position but that Bush did as well,” said Richard Holbrooke, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations for the Clinton administration. Saturday, the shift continued when the German magazine Der Spiegel ran an interview with Maliki in which he called for U.S. troops to withdraw “as soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.” (While a spokesperson for Maliki later claimed the prime minister’s comments "were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately,” Der Spiegel stood by its report and The New York Times late last night verified the translation’s accuracy.)  For the first time in the national security debate, Obama’s advisers believe that McCain has been placed on the defensive, since his reluctance to support a “time horizon” now differs not only with the position of his Democratic opponent but also with those of the White House and the Iraqi prime minister. 

MORE: News in Hot Spots Appears to Aid Obama (Jonathan Martin, Politico)
Barack Obama's long-awaited and much-hyped trip overseas, in large part intended to overcome a perception that he’s not up to the job of commander-in-chief, seems to have come at the perfect time as recent events in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran have played into his message. Afghanistan, which Obama has long said should be the central front in the battle against Islamic extremism, returned to the front pages last week when militants breached a compound and killed nine U.S. soldiers, adding heft to reports over the last several months that the Taliban is resurgent there. Then, in a reversal, the Bush administration sent Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns, the third-ranking official in the State Department, to Switzerland this weekend for a formal meeting with Iranian officials and representatives from other countries about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. The meeting was, the New York Times noted, “the highest-level session between the countries during the Bush administration.” But it’s Iraq where Obama got perhaps his most significant bon voyage gift. 

AFTER 2000, MCCAIN LEARNED TO WORK LEVERS OF POWER
(David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times)
Previously a marginal player better known for heckling the Senate than for influencing it, Mr. McCain returned from the 2000 campaign with a new national reputation and a new political sophistication. Over the next eight years, he mastered the art of political triangulation — variously teaming up with Mr. Lott against the president or the new Republican leaders, with Democrats against Republicans, and with the president against the Democrats — to become perhaps the chamber’s most influential member... To partisans on either side, Mr. McCain’s path could be puzzling, even infuriating. On the defining issue of the Iraq war, he hammered both sides: the White House for its execution of the conflict and the Democrats for their opposition. On immigration, he joined the Democrats and the White House to battle his own party. And to the Republican leaders, he was a serial turncoat on other domestic matters, marching at the head of a Democratic column into fights over tax cuts, campaign finance restrictions, Alaskan oil drilling, access to generic drugs, gun-show sales, pollution caps, the 9/11 commission and the use of torture.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

When former Texas senator and then-current John McCain economic adviser Phil Gramm said last week that America was a "nation of whiners" mired in a mere "mental recession" (prompting a predictable firestorm of controversy) the Republican nominee joked that his colleague "would be in serious consideration for Ambassador to Belarus" in a future administration-- adding "although I'm not sure the citizens of Minsk would welcome that." Now, it seems, Gramm will have plenty of time brush up on his Belarusian.

In a statement issued after last night's network news broadcasts--no better time for bad news than after dinner on Friday--Gramm announced that he was stepping down from his post as national co-chair for McCain. The reason: he didn't want to be a distraction. "It is clear to me that Democrats want to attack me rather than debate Senator McCain on important economic issues facing the country," he said. "That kind of distraction hurts not only Senator McCain's ability to present concrete programs to deal with the country's problems, it hurts the country."

The move came after several days of confusion about exactly what role the off-message Gramm would play on McCain's campaign. Last weekend, two of McCain's other economic advisers, Doug Holtz-Eakin and Carly Fiorina, indicated that Gramm would no longer talk to the media or act as a surrogate on the candidate's behalf, with Holtz-Eakin going so far as to say that Gramm would stop advising McCain by cell phone as well. But spokesman Tucker Bounds insisted at the time that the campaign had not made "any substantive status change to his volunteer post on the campaign." That changed yesterday when McCain's team apparently decided that even retaining Gramm in a behind-the-scenes position wasn't worth the political costs--namely, continued attacks on McCain's economic empathy from Democratic rival Barack Obama. 

Gramm is the latest surrogate to succumb to what's become 2008's most potent political weapon: guilt by association. Previously, former Rep. Tom Loeffler, also from Texas, quit his McCain co-chair post after reports about his lobbying by NEWSWEEK's Michael Isikoff distracted from the campaign message; on the other side of the aisle, Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power was forced to tender her resignation after calling Hillary Clinton "a monster" in an off-the-record conversation with a reporter. 

Perhaps they can practice their Belarusian together. 
 

What follows is the pool report--a dispatch circulated among reporters who can't attend an event--from Obama's overnight trip to Afghanistan. It's written by John McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. The most newsworthy part is when Obama--clearly aware that Republicans want to portray him as presumptuous--makes sure to remind us that he's "going over there as a U.S. senator" and is "more interested in listening than doing a lot of talking." These reports should be coming in all week, and I'm considering posting as many as possible. I think they'll provide a nice, factual, behind-the-scenes look at the trip. Let me know if you're interested in reading more.

The motorcade left Sen. Obama’s home in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood at 11:11 a.m. There was one Chicago Police Department patrol car, followed by two SUVs, a sedan and a press van. Riding in the press van were agent Jill, Sam, John McCormick of the Chicago Tribune and Glen Johnson of The Associated Press. The motorcade headed north on Lake Shore Drive to I-55 (Stevenson Expressway) and toward MDW. The CPD blocked traffic for our turn onto the western perimeter of the airfield, where we arrived at 11:31 a.m. Waiting on the tarmac was a Gulfstream III (G3) executive jet (tail number N366JA). We exited our respective vehicles at 11:34 a.m.
 
The crew was waiting outside for the senator’s arrival and a few photos with him near a wing. He was wearing tan slacks and a short black jacket. After fishing around in the back of one of the SUVs for his luggage (he seemed especially to be checking his suits inside a garment bag), he was on the bird by 11:36 a.m. Also getting on the plane were eight Secret Service agents and the two reporters. The senator briefly greeted us as we walked past his seat in the forward section. Seated near him was senior spokeswoman Linda Douglass, the only staff member on the flight.
 
After everyone found a seat on the crowded plane, the pilot announced that the flying time would be between 80 and 85 minutes. All seemed eager for him to start the engines, since the plane had been sitting under a hot sun and the cabin temperature was likely somewhere in the 90s. Sweat had begun to roll down the faces of some of the agents.“We’re just easing you into it,” Obama told his bodyguards, referring to the heat and the desert weather they would all be traveling to in the coming days.

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...

John McCain sure knows how to say bon voyage. 

With Barack Obama packing his bags for next week's journey to Europe and the Middle East--where the entire U.S. political press corps will watch, dumbstruck, as hope and change and audaciousness spread unbridled o'er the land--the Arizona Republican this afternoon gave his rival a not-so-friendly parting gift: the first real negative ad of the 2008 general-election cycle. Called "Troop Funding," the blistering spot uses the Democrat's overseas trip to compare him unfavorably to McCain on national security and press the case that he's a no-good, yellow-bellied, flip-flopping opportunist.

The only problem: it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

The ad accuses Obama of three offenses: he "never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan," even though he chairs the Senate foreign relations subcommittee tasked with overseeing military operations in that country; he "hasn't been to Iraq in years"; and he "vot[ed] against funding our troops." All of these, says an announcer, are "positions that helped him win his nomination"--and now that he has, "he's changing to help himself become president." So what's wrong here? For starters, none of these "positions" actually helped Obama win the Democratic nod. It's not like the party was looking for a troop-hating, Iraq-avoiding, hearing-skipping candidate and Obama happened to fit the bill. So the whole "he's changing to help himself" accusation isn't particularly convincing.

More importantly, while the individual complaints may sound damning when simplified and strung together, they quickly crumble upon closer examination--especially as contrasts with McCain. It's true that Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan--but that's because Joe Biden, the chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, has insisted that hearings on this critical issue be held at the full committee level, and not at the subcommittee level. It's also true that Obama has only attended on Afghanistan-related Senate meeting over the past two years, as McCain has loudly noted elsewhere. Unfortunately, McCain's record--he's attended zero of his Armed Services committee's six hearings on the subject since 2006--is even worse. Sadly, that's what happens when you're running for president--the day job suffers. Neither Obama nor McCain should treat his opponent's Capitol Hill absences as especially unusual. Nor should voters.

Then there's the little issue of "vot[ing] against funding our troops." Sounds despicable, right? Unfortunately, it's just another example of the way Washington works. Obama did, in fact, vote against a 2007 war-funding bill. But it wasn't because he hates American soldiers. Instead, he was registering an objection to legislation that "lacked a timetable for troop withdrawal"--a position that arguably means he was more concerned about troop well-being, not less. Reasonable people can disagree over whether timetables are warranted. But portraying this as a vote "against the troops" is silly. It's also a game two can play. On March 29, 2007, McCain 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. Why? Because it included a timetable for troop withdrawal. Does than make him a anti-soldier? Not at all. But it wouldn't stop an opponent from characterizing his vote--unfairly--as such.

Finally, there's Iraq. This is probably McCain's most meaningful beef with Obama. Since May, the Arizonan, who visits every few months, has said that his rival, who hasn't visited since 2006, should return and assess the changing conditions in person. He's right. As my NEWSWEEK colleague Michael Hirsh noted earlier today, "the Democratic senator missed witnessing the sectarian violence that roiled Iraq for more a year, and he has not had a firsthand look at the surge's success even as he has continued to say he would withdraw troops within 16 months of his presidency." But there are two important caveats to consider. One, heavily chaperoned congressional travel doesn't always offer the most accurate (or revealing) view of a war zone. Take McCain's April 1, 2007 trip to Baghdad. At the time, McCain claimed that his stroll through an open-air market proved that people could now "walk freely" through the city. But it was later reported that the candidate wore a flak jacket and received protection from 100 soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships during his promenade; snipers returned the next day and murdered a few Shiite merchants. (CNN even deemed the area too dangerous to visit without military escort.) Second, Obama is already planning do this summer what McCain has said he should do--that is, visit Iraq. This doesn't change the fact that he should've gone earlier. But it does instantly outdate the Republican's attack.

Ultimately, McCain is trying to frame Obama as a no* know-nothing foreign-policy novice maneuvering for maximum political gain. He may have a point. He may not. But by choosing to focus "Troop Funding" on matters of symbolism rather than substance, he doesn't really make it.

*D'oh.
 

Here's my NEWSWEEK colleague Michael Hirsh with a very astute take on Barack Obama's upcoming overseas adventure:

As Obama heads to Europe and the Mideast this coming week, he is embarking on what might be called his "Ich bin ein Commander" test. It may well be the decisive one of his candidacy, especially with so many media stars--including three network anchors--along for the ride. One major reason why Obama's opponent, John McCain, has managed so far to rise above the public's grim assessment of the Republican Party is that, for many voters, he has already passed this test. Even though Americans think by a two-to-one margin Obama would do more to improve the country's image abroad than McCain, according to the new Washington Post-ABC News survey, only 48 percent said the Democrat would make a good commander in chief compared to 72 percent for his Republican rival. And "head to head, McCain was judged as the one with greater knowledge of the world by more than 2 to 1," the Post reported.

McCain has rightly hammered away at Obama's failure to visit Afghanistan at all and not to have traveled to Iraq since January 2006. That means the Democratic senator missed witnessing the sectarian violence that roiled Iraq for more a year, and he has not had a firsthand look at the surge's success even as he has continued to say he would withdraw troops within 16 months of his presidency. A new McCain campaign video shows a series of devastating clips from Obama's appearances on "Meet the Press" and other shows in 2006 and 2007, one of which quotes him as saying things were "actually worsening" in Iraq after surge. "Now he says the surge is working," the video proclaims, and it then proceeds to feature clips of Obama later praising the results in Iraq. The video also shows Obama seeming to fudge on his pledge of immediate withdrawal from Iraq. In the hands of Republican researchers, Obama's signature campaign line--"Change we can believe in"--is starting to take on an ironic sting. The Washington Post-ABC poll also shows that the public is now divided between the two senators' views of how to deal with Iraq.

Obama aides protest that public opinion simply needs to catch up with the facts. And it is true that on several key foreign-policy issues, both McCain and the Bush administration--as well as conventional wisdom--have been moving toward Obama's position, rather than the other way around. Obama was the first major candidate to call for a swift diversion of U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and now both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have echoed those views. McCain himself, who had called Iraq the central front in the war on terror in the early months of his campaign, this week announced that he would send an additional three brigades to Afghanistan (one-upping Obama,who has called for two brigades). Obama has also consistently said--often to hoots of criticism from both Hillary Clinton and McCain for his supposed naiveté--that he would negotiate direcly with Iran over its nuclear program. Now the Bush administration is sending, for the first time, an envoy to the talks with Tehran taking place in Geneva... The administration is also talking about opening a special interests office in Tehran. And on Pakistan, Obama has long called for greater humanitarian aid to help that country wean itself from extremism. Now, in a bipartisan effort, Sens. Richard Lugar and Joseph Biden have sponsored a bill that would authorize $7.5 billion over five years in aid for building schools, roads, clinics and other development projects. All that should be proof enough, says a top Obama adviser, that "the threshold question is whether you have the policies and the judgment" to be commander in chief.

Still, reality doesn't always catch up with perception in time for an election. And despite survey numbers that consistently show Americans more concerned about the economy and domestic issues than Iraq and other international issues, the commander-in-chief test is often the decisive one when it's time to enter the voting booth...

The warm embrace that Obama will receive on his overseas trip is sure to be a boost, coming at a time when people are desperate for a new optimism about the perception of America in the world. "What will help him is that in contrast to the very icy response that Bush gets, Obama's going to be greeted as some kind of Second Coming," says Dallek. But if he stumbles--especially with such high expectations--he could end up looking like an innocent abroad, which would produce precisely the opposite effect Obama is seeking. With so much to prove, there is also the danger of overreaching. The Democratic candidate, for example, had expressed interest in speaking at the Brandenberg Gate near the site of the old Berlin Wall--the venue of Ronald Reagan's famous 1987 exhortation to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." (JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech took place in another part of the city.) But German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed doubts about an Obama appearance, reminding everyone that this was principally a political, not a diplomatic, visit by a man who is not yet president. At a time when the Republicans are deriding Obama as a political changeling, this little contretemps was not a good way to start off his foreign tour.

READ THE REST HERE. 

 
Spotted by NEWSWEEK's own Holly Bailey in John McCain's seat on board his campaign plane Thursday afternoon: "The Return of History and the End of Dreams" by Robert Kagan, neoconservative thinker and informal McCain adviser. 

In case you're curious, Kagan is "a hate figure for large sections of the left... [who] has been blamed for many things, prominent among them being one of the intellectual authors and cheerleaders for the US-led war in Iraq." His slim volume is essentially an extended essay on how "autocracy is making a comeback" and how "the new era, rather than being a time of 'universal values,' will be one of growing tensions and sometimes confrontation between the forces of democracy and the forces of autocracy." Here's how New York Times chief Washington correspondent David E. Sanger summarized Kagan's argument in his recent review: "The cold war may be over, but anyone who thinks the result was really 'the end of history' — a consensus that liberal democracy is the future — should take another look." Like his fellow neocons, Kagan boasts "an untrammeled faith in democracy as an engine of peace," so his prescription for dealing with resurgent autocracies in "a world where the United Nations Security Council is 'hopelessly paralyzed' and NATO is happiest parachuting into territory where there is little chance of hearing gunfire," as Sanger puts it, is a something called a "league of democracies."

If you've been following the campaign at all, this should sound familiar. On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. The centerpiece? A league of democracies. In his address, McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia and exclude China from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries, and take in both India and Brazil, creating a group that would, in the words of my NEWSWEEK colleague Fareed Zakaria, "presumably play the role that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would be cast outside the pale." Fareed, for one, is not a fan. Calling the McCain/Kagan proposal "the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years," he questioned how the League of Democracies would fight terrorism while excluding countries like Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Singapore; secure loose nukes without Russia's cooperation; and coordinate problems of the emerging global economy by putting China on the sidelines.

Maybe you disagree. That's fine. The point is, Kagan is "one of the few foreign policy intellectuals that [McCain] seems to respect." So much so, in fact, that the senator now seems to be rereading "The Return of History." (Judging by his effusive blurb on the book's back flap--"important, timely, superbly-written"--he has already read it at least once.) As the political press spends its newsless summer obsessing over cartoons and "nuts" and Obama's excessive exercising, it'd probably benefit every serious voter--that is, every voter serious enough to wonder how a President McCain would alter American foreign policy--to crack its cover as well.
 

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

PROMISES TO KEEP
(Ashley Johnson, National Journal)
As voters assess the candidates' competing visions, they must also weigh how likely either man would be to follow through on his promises. If history is any guide, the answer is "very." "There's this myth that politicians will say anything to get elected, but that generally is not the case," said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "They take their public statements seriously. And they know they're going to be held accountable by the media and the opposition." In studying party platforms in presidential elections from 1944 to 1976, Pomper found that presidents converted about 70 percent of their party's promises into policy. He said that track record is "pretty good," considering that about half of U.S. marriages end in divorce--a broken vow. Jeff Fishel, a professor emeritus of government at American University, reached a similar conclusion in his study of presidential performance, published in the 1985 book Presidents & Promises. Fishel tracked campaign pledges from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Reagan and determined that presidents followed through about 66 percent of the time.

MCCAIN'S STRAIGHT TALK SPINS WHEELS
(Stephen Dinan, Washington Times)
At times it appears Sen. John McCain's Straight Talk Express should stop and ask for directions. From signature issues such as immigration and climate change to tax cuts, the presumed Republican presidential nominee sometimes just seems lost as to his own record and his stance on hot-button social issues. After Mr. McCain said he opposed child adoptions to gay and lesbian couples, his campaign clarified that he wasn't making policy and would leave the issue to the states. In the past week, the candidate was unable to say whether he thought health care plans that cover drugs to treat impotency also should cover contraceptives. Mr. McCain voted against such a proposal in 2005. For a candidate who delights in telling audiences that it's time for "a little straight talk," he has given his opponents chances to question that reputation... The problem, said Michael McKenna, a Republican strategist who works on climate change issues, is that Mr. McCain's campaign doesn't prepare him well and that he stakes out positions for political reasons.

A CAST OF 300 ADVISES OBAMA ON FOREIGN POLICY
(Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times)
Every day around 8 a.m., foreign policy aides at Senator Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters send him two e-mails: a briefing on major world developments over the previous 24 hours and a set of questions, accompanied by suggested answers, that the candidate is likely to be asked about international relations during the day... Behind the e-mail messages is a tight-knit group of aides supported by a huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national security experience remains a concern to many voters... [One] person who has contributed outside advice is former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, whom Mr. Obama has been wooing. Mr. Powell, a Republican, has a friendship of decades with Mr. McCain, but friends say he has felt excluded from Mr. McCain’s foreign policy operation and was impressed when Mr. Obama called on him in June.

THE OBAMA ROADSHOW
(John Dickerson, Slate)
The anchors are a big coup for Obama as he heads to Europe, the Middle East, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They confer instant legitimacy. McCain, like Hillary Clinton before him, is arguing that Obama isn't qualified to be commander in chief, but the networks are treating him like he's already got the job. Each one will get an interview on a different night, which means Obama stands to control at least three days of news coverage in a campaign in which candidates are lucky if they can shape a few hours. The rest of the press hoard following Obama and the expected adoring crowds of cheering Europeans will only enhance the presidential tableau... Because of the other factors that favor him—and his edge on economic issues, which voters say worry them the most—he won't have to convince voters that he is better than McCain on the commander-international front. Instead, it should be enough to show that he is sufficiently qualified to handle the job. If enough voters feel safe with him, they can feel free to embrace the other reasons they like him. At the same time, the trip poses big risks.

HYSTERIA ALERT
(Gerard Baker, London Times)
There is something else in the enthusiasm for the Illinois senator that should not be lightly disdained by Americans, even those of a conservative mind. As even his opponent, John McCain, graciously put it this week, it suggests there is still something about America that can inspire the rest of the world. I've never really bought the argument that the hostility of the past eight years was simply anti-Bush, rather than, anti-American sentiment. And I still don't believe it. What people dislike about President Bush is what they think they know about America - its ignorance, its arrogance, its narrow-mindedness - all caricatures duly fed by the media coverage of the country and its culture and its politics. But there was, it's true, always the other side to the ambivalence of the world's thoughts about America. The rise of Senator Obama is a reminder of what the rest of the world still admires - sometimes very grudgingly - about America: a constant capacity to renew itself.  And when you think about it, if, as seems quite likely, America under the next president is going to proceed in a direction that is not markedly different from what it has done in the past few years, is it really such a bad thing if the world actually quite likes the man leading it?

CONTINUED AFTER THE JUMP...
 

As I read Michael Crowley's excellent profile of McCain assistant, speechwriter and all-around alter ego Mark Salter in the New Republic this morning, I was struck by one section in particular. Frustrated by constant criticism of his boss's oratorical abilities, Salter, Crowley reports, is retreating to his summer cottage in Maine to craft the senator's convention speech--a "task fellow McCainiacs acknowledge will be critical." His plan? To contrast McCain's moments of self-sacrifice, "as when he refused early release from captivity in Vietnam or challenged his own party over campaign finance reform"--Crowley's words, not Salter's--with the "selfishness" of "self-interested" political partisans like Obama, who risk "nothing of substance in their lives" as they flit through a "narcissistic world of Facebook and YouTube and Scarlett Johansson."

Facebook? YouTube? Scarlett? It's almost as if, according to Crowley, Salter sees Obama as--heart be still--a millennial.

I happen to agree. Back in February, I wrote a long feature for the dead-tree edition of NEWSWEEK called "He's One of Us Now" that was basically a reported essay on why Obama is " the first millennial to run for president." Given that Obama was born in 1961 and the millennial (or Generation Y) birth years started around 1979 and ended around 1995, a handful of readers disagreed with my analysis. He's a "late boomer" said one. He belongs to "Generation Jones" said another. Gen X has plenty of proponents, too. But my point in the piece wasn't to alter the space-time continuum by suggesting that Obama is a millennial; obviously he's too old for that. Instead it was, as I wrote then, to show "how fully and seamlessly he embodies the attitudes, aspirations and shortcomings of the generation that's rallied around him." (Necessary caveat: Summing up an entire generation with a few broad brush strokes is always hazardous, especially in politics. But that doesn't mean it can't be revealing.) In other words, I wanted to argue that Obama, the political phenomenon, belongs to Generation Y--even if he belongs to another generation by birth. The question then was whether that would be a good thing. Apparently, it still is.

Salter, of course, would say no, and it's not hard to see why. Weaned on a sugary self-esteem diet, my peers and I are generally viewed as a vain generation with an insatiable appetite for self-expression—and plenty of places (Facebook, MySpace, blogs, AIM, reality TV, etc.) to express ourselves. That look-at-me posture seems alien to older Americans, which is why members of McCain's entourage privately refer to the prone-to-preening Obama as "The One." The more pervasive product of our meritocratic upbringings, however, is an instinct for goal-oriented, self-improving, resume-building professionalism that shapes every aspect of our lives. "They're not trying to buck the system," reported David Brooks in his influential 2001 essay "The Organization Kid." "They're trying to climb it, and they are streamlined for ascent." That neatly summarizes Obama's rise. As Ryan Lizza writes in this week's New Yorker, "perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them." Lizza continues:

When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war... He has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist.

It makes sense, of course, that Salter would characterize this sort of maneuvering as "selfish" and risk-free and seek to contrast it with McCain's moments of maverick defiance and "sacrifice." That's politics.

But it's also pretty one-sided take on Generation Y--and Obama. *According to Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, authors of "Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics," millennials may not be "confrontational or combative, the way Boomers (whose generational mantra was 'Don't trust anyone over 30') have been." But they do belong to what social scientist William Strauss calls a "civic generation," drawn instead to issues of "community, politics and deeds, whereas the boomers focused on issues of self, culture and morals." Reacting against the excesses of their parents—especially efforts to advance moral causes through partisan politics—they prefer to address problems non-ideologically, by reforming institutions from within. They're team players, say Winograd and Hais, conditioned through constant social interaction (often online) to "find consensus, 'win-win' solutions to any problem." They distrust traditional channels of information and prefer to learn from peers (again, often online). They are diverse. And after George W. Bush, they believe, as Obama youth-vote director Hans Riemer told me earlier this year, "that it matters who's running the government—and that government is a powerful way to make this country a better place."* All of this is consistent with Obama's "post-partisan" character--and his frequent calls to stop "re-litigating sex, drugs, rock and roll [and] Vietnam." Paired with his political instincts, in fact, it's probably what would make him an effective president. There's actually value in the millennial worldview.

Ultimately, I don't really believe that Salter is setting out to declare generational warfare on millennials. He probably doesn't know (or care) what a millennial is. But that's part of the problem with McCain's current line of attack. Last week, the campaign released an ad called "The Summer of Love" that opened with stock late-Sixties footage of goateed protesters, flamboyant queens and nearly naked longhairs making out in a muddy field. The message: while McCain, a POW at the time, stands for service and selflessness, his rival for the White House represents "hope," "change," narcissism and "beautiful words [that] cannot make our lives better"--just like those dirty hippies. Compared to McCain, it seems, every generation born after World War II is the same to Salter and Co.: petty, selfish, narcissistic. Scarlett Johansson? Janis Joplin? What's the difference? Yes, McCain is a war hero and an honorable public servant. But emphasizing those qualities in broad generational terms--i.e., "traditional" values vs. whatever came next--doesn't make for particularly good politics. It's the "when I was your age" dilemma. Besides reminding America that the senator belongs to a bygone era, such a strategy implicitly belittles anyone younger than the candidate himself. And as McCain knows all too well, that category happens to include the vast majority of voters.

*Adapted from "He's One of Us Now."

UPDATE, July 18: An interesting "rebuttal" of sorts from David Brooks:

The next few years will be an age of government activism. You may think, therefore, that this situation is ripe for Democratic dominance... Yet, historically, periods of great governmental change have often been periods of conservative rule. It’s as if voters understand that they need big changes, but they want those changes planned and enacted by leaders who will restrain the pace of change and prevent radical excess... John McCain’s challenge is to recreate this model. He will never get as many cheers in Germany as Barack Obama, but for a century his family has embodied American heroism. He will never seem as young and forward-leaning as his opponent, but he did have his values formed in an age that people now look back to with respect... If McCain is going to win this election, it will because he can communicate an essential truth — that people in a great and successful nation do not want change for its own sake. But they do realize that it’s only through careful reform that they can preserve what they and their ancestors have so laboriously built.
 

Photo via SI 

Was it the Bloomin' Onion that did it?

Known to reporters on the trail as an workoutaholic who rarely goes 24 hours without hitting a treadmill, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made a strong bid yesterday for Exerciser-in-Chief -- or at least Post-Outback-Self-Flagellator-in-Chief --by making three separate stops at two Chicago gyms in the course of a single day. As ABC News' Sunlen Miller reports, the presumptive nominee started his Tuesday with a short morning session at the apartment building of friend and longtime aide Mike Signator, then flew to Indiana for a campaign event and a round of local TV interviews. When he returned home to Illinois, Obama again visited Signator's gym, then went home briefly before lighting out for the East Bank Club, a massive downtown facility where he regularly plays basketball. All told, Obama spent 98 minutes campaigning--and 188 minutes pumping iron.

Or did he? That's the question AP reporter Glen Johnson asked Obama spokesman Bill Burton this morning after reporters trailing the Illinois senator noticed that he displayed "a distinct lack of visible sweat" throughout the day and even arrived at the East Bank Club "dressed casually as if going out to dinner, wearing slacks, a blue blazer and flip-flops"--observations that apparently sparked speculation "about whether he was actually exercising or using the gym visits as cover for conducting vice presidential vetting or interviews." (Yes, candidates actually do stuff like this.) Burton's terse email response--"Working out"--was pretty clear. But in case anyone was still suspicious, Johnson--in what's easily the sentence of the day--provided the American people with a crucial piece of evidence that proves, once and for all, why they should take Burton's word for it. As "some of the photographers who regularly accompany Obama [told the AP]," he writes, "even when he shot hoops earlier this year with members of the University of North Carolina varsity men's basketball team, they didn't see Obama sweat." 

You heard it here first, folks: the Obamacle does not secrete water and chlorides through his epidermis. He has no need for thermoregulation. Ever. Basketball. Vice presidential interviews. Whatever. He's like a walking block of ice. That never melts. Or a giant stick of antiperspirant. The metaphorical possibilities are endless.

No word yet from the Obama press shop whether the senator will now be conducting all of his workouts in business casual attire. You know, because he can.
 

By Holly Bailey 

With word that the three network news anchors will be joining Barack Obama on his trip overseas next week, the New York Times today raises the question of whether John McCain has been given short shrift when it comes to media coverage. It's been a festering complaint among McCain's senior aides, who haven't been shy about telling reporters (often down to the minute) how much time McCain has received on the evening news versus Obama. The Times correctly notes that the network anchors didn't travel with McCain on his last trip to Iraq in March, which also took him throughout the Middle East and Europe.

But there's a big difference between McCain's trip and the one Obama will embark on next week to Europe and the Middle East. In what could be interpreted now as a possible strategic misstep, the McCain campaign chose not to take reporters along for the ride, forcing media outlets who wanted to cover the newly elected GOP nominee to travel on their own without any guarantee of getting anywhere near the senator. The small group of scribes who made the trek (Newsweek chose not to) faced a logistical nightmare, from arranging last-minute foreign visas to struggling to keep up with McCain as they flew commercially from stop to stop. (McCain traveled by a military aircraft.) In contrast, the Obama campaign is inviting reporters on its tour, handling all the logistics--including transportation--for what will certainly be a much larger press corps than usual.

Why didn't McCain take reporters on his first overseas visit since clinching the nomination? For one, McCain was on official Senate travel, and aides rightly worried about an onslaught of stories questioning whether he was improperly using his Senate office to benefit his presidential campaign. It was also a campaign in transition, and they worried they didn't have the manpower logistically to handle a large press corps on an overseas swing. The Arizona senator did do several media interviews while abroad, including a pre-arranged sit-down with CNN's John King in Saddam Hussein's old palace in Baghdad. And some of the campaign beat regulars were on hand when McCain made a big time gaffe, confusing Sunnis and Shiites. It made headlines back home, but as First Read notes, it didn't create nearly the stir it would have had Brian Williams, Katie Couric or Charlie Gibson been reported their evening newscast from the scene.

Still, McCain aides were disappointed that the senator's trip didn't generate more coverage back home--headlines they hoped would highlight McCain's foreign policy expertise. Indeed, some notable moments of McCain's trip went largely unnoticed back in the States, including a made-for-campaign moment of pleasantly surprised tourists chanting "Mac is Back! Mac is Back!" as the senator arrived at a Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. In advance of Obama's trip, McCain aides have been critical of what they see as a double standard. This morning,McCain communication director Jill Hazelbaker called the Democratic nominee's jaunt a "first-of-its-kind campaign rally overseas." (On his bus this afternoon in Kansas City, McCain said he didn't agree with Hazelbaker's remarks and told reporters he would "talk to her.") Yet mixed with that criticism must be a degree of disappointment at what McCain's March trip could have been.

 UPDATE, 5:45 p.m.: Shortly after arriving in Michigan for a fundraiser, McCain went before reporters and clarified the remarks he made earlier this afternoon about Obama's overseas trip. McCain said he had been talking about Obama's trip to Iraq and Afghanistan-not the other stops on his tour-when he said he didn't think the visit was political in nature. "What Sen. Obama does in the other countries, whether political rallies or not, obviously would then give them a political flavor to say the least," McCain said.

The campaign organized the impromptu press conference after a quick campaign stop at Pronto Pup, a corn dog shop on the shores of White Lake in Western Michigan. As McCain spoke, Nicolle Wallace, a former White House aide who recently joined the campaign as an adviser, stood a few feet away, holding her cell phone toward McCain so that someone on the other end could hear. When McCain moved on to other subjects, Wallace walked away and began talking into the phone.

"If he has political rallies in other places, then obviously it's a political trip," McCain said. "Apparently it's gonna be if he is going to have a rally in Germany at the Brandenberg Gate, which is what is being publicly stated. Of course, if you have political rallies then it's a political event."
 

Call it a blessing in disguise--or a very smart bit of strategery.

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal published a story titled "McCain Camp Pegs Total War Chest at $400 Million." The big news, however, had nothing to do with the Republican nominee. According to WSJ reporters Christopher Cooper and Susan Davis--who claimed to have a source close to the campaign--Barack Obama was "expected to report that he had raised little more than $30 million in June." Given that the Illinois senator had raked in $55 million in February and nearly $300 million during the 16-month primary campaign, wrote Cooper and Davis, this total was "underwhelming"--the result, they added, of reluctance among Hillary Clinton's big-money people to fund her former foe and Obama's own "shifts to the center," which had dampened the ardor of his small-donor base.

Here at Stumper headquarters, we joined the choir, comparing the Democrat's cash on hand--his campaign coffers plus the DNC war chest--unfavorably with McCain and the RNC, who, thanks to aggressive joint efforts to raise as much private money as possible before the Arizonan's public financing kicks in, had $102.6 million remaining at the end of June. (That would be more than double Obama's May bank balance.) "The real story of this year's money race," we wrote, "[is that] it's much more competitive than anyone expected." Even when Obama spokesman Dan Pfieffer told reporters that the WSJ number was "way off the mark," we responded with skepticism. "Unless Obama and DNC raked in a combined total in the neighborhood of $70 million," we wrote, noting that the DNC had raised a mere $4 million in May, "the Republicans still have more cash on hand."

Turns out the Democrats did exactly that. This morning, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe announced in an email to supporters that his boss had netted an eye-popping $52 million in June, boosting his available cash balance to $72 million. Meanwhile, DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney revealed that the national party raked in more than $22 million, leaving them with $20 million in the vault. Combined, that gives the Democrats a cash-on-hand total of $92 million--a measly $3 million short of the GOP's current $95 million war chest. In retrospect, this should've seemed inevitable--of course a new opponent would energize Obama's donors, and of course the DNC's haul would grow as Democratic fat-cats finally start to funnel their $28,500 checks through the party. But the WSJ report had the predictable effect of lowering the press's astronomical expectations, so that what once looked obvious now looks surprising. Hence excitable headlines like "Obama Outraises McCain 2-to1"--and another news cycle dominated by the Democrat. It's almost as if David Axelrod was the one whispering "$30 million" in Cooper's ear.

That said, it's worth noting that the basic contours of the cash contest haven't changed: Obama is breaking records and McCain is holding his own. Two numbers tell the entire Obama story: $2 million and $68. The latter is the average size of a contribution to the Obama campaign in June. The amazing thing is that it's about $30 lower than the average contribution in May, April or March. This indicates that the senator attracted a massive number of new $5, $10, $20 donors once the primaries ended--presumably from the ranks of devoted Dems who had (until then) supported Hillary Clinton. Going forward, the sustained growth of this small-sum base is by far Obama's biggest advantage over McCain, who's relying mostly on big-money people to max out and move along.

Same goes for the $2 million--i.e., the meager amount Obama banked last month for the general election. At first, the sum is misleading; you'd think Obama would want to save as much as possible for the final leg of the race.* But because there's a $2,300 cap on what an individual supporters can give in the primaries and a separate $2,300 limit on general-election contributions--not to mention the fact that primary cash "rolls over" into the general-election account--all this means is that very few of Obama's nearly two million donors have reached even that initial $2,300 ceiling (otherwise, more of them would be giving to the fall fund). Ultimately, Obama could raise more than $250 million by Election Day if he continues at this pace--and judging by his expanding pool of small donors, he will.

Still, that doesn't mean McCain is the slouch most pundits expected him to be. Because the senator opted into the public financing system, he'll receive a lump sum of $84.1 million in taxpayer money (or $42 million per month) after the Republican convention, plus about $100 million of assistance from the comparatively rich RNC. Combined with his expected pre-convention tally of $60 million, that comes to about $250 million as well. Which is plenty of dough to spread around. The big benefit for McCain, of course, is that public financing frees him up to focus the final leg of his campaign on voters instead of donors. Obama, meanwhile, must keep posting $50-million months from now through November 4--even detouring from the trail if necessary. In other words, Obama's June was very, very impressive. But anything less would've been unacceptable.

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

WHAT KIND OF LEADER WOULD MCCAIN OR OBAMA BE?
(David Gergen and Andy Zelleke, Christian Science Monitor)
No president in modern times has faced a more daunting agenda than awaits the man who wins in November; arguably, we have to go all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt in March 1933 to find a parallel. From Day One, the incoming president will face ongoing dangers t