Obama, Berlin, & His "Presidential Gap"

Earlier this week, Senator Barack Obama gave a speech in Berlin, Germany during his overseas tour, which is now concluding in Great Britain. German officials estimated the crowd that assembled to hear Obama speak at 200,000. That same day, Senator John McCain -- in what I can only assume was an attempt to give a freebee to O'brien, Leno, and Letterman -- had lunch at a German restaurant in Pennsylvania.

You can find initial analysis of Obama's speech here. Both video and text of the speech can be found here.

Many in the German crowd in Berlin were waiving American flags. The world does not, by and large, dislike Americans. The world has, however, come to despise our government... and rightly so. Our allies yearn to once again respect the United States, to find America in a justified role of leadership. This should not surprise us since we, too, here at home yearn for this same thing.

I have my doubts about how big a bump in the polls this overseas trip of Obama's will give him in the short run. It will surely help him some right now. However, I think it will prove its true worth down the road.

This presidential race really isn't between Obama and McCain. If it were, Obama would have already won handily. The mood of the country is for change and the Republican brand is stone cold. I predict handy pick-ups in both the House and the Senate for the Democrats in November as a result. However, the race for the presidency is much more convoluted than it is for any member of Congress. While I think that Americans want to choose change -- to choose Obama -- many are also reticent to "leap before they look." Hillary Clinton set this up as the "Commander in Chief Test" during the primary campaign. While I think we tend to forget that the president is specifically set up in the Constitution as the civilian head of the military, having someone with a "military bearing" as president seems important to us as voters. While one can argue whether or not John McCain has any qualifications greater than -- or even close to equal to -- Obama's in terms of his foreign policy ability, the one thing that his military service has confered upon him is this military bearing.

Now, how I believe that Obama's overseas travel will help him is that it will slowly change the narative in the media regarding his having met the "Commander in Chief Test." Right now, it is always framed as a question and it is presented as a given that McCain has done so -- in no small part due to Clinton, damn her. As the media comes around to the fact that Obama is indeed ready for the world stage -- and as McCain's continued flubs about the facts of foreign policy become harder for the media to ignore -- Obama as Commander in Chief will be presented as a given rather than as a question to be answered. At that point, the polls will rise and hopefully at just the right time.

McCain, on the other hand, is a bomb ready to go off again and again. The question isn't if or even when. The question is whether the media will stop covering for him.

26 July 2008