Obama’s trip has dealt him new cards to play at home
I don’t want to feed into that ridiculous rightwing narrative about Obama thinking he’s the messiah. He’s a politician. He happens to have special talents, to which some people respond passionately. Others don’t. But that’s their problem. The Beatles didn’t order millions of teenage girls to scream, and Obama did not put pixie dust in America’s, or the world’s, watercoolers. He’s hardly responsible for people’s positive reactions to him.
He must, however, be pretty pleased overall. While the trip will not have the effect of making Americans en masse rise up and carry his banner and declare the election over, I think it’s safe to say that he’s banked some goodwill and credibility whose domestic political benefits will reveal themselves slowly and become more apparent this autumn, perhaps especially during the three presidential debates.
This voter undoubtedly knows that Obama just took a big trip and will have seen the images, and may even be able to name one substantive thing that happened during the trip. But this voter still doesn’t know that much about Obama. She or he is going to have to spend a lot of timing watching him over the course of the autumn and thinking about whether to put him in the White House just as she or he is going to watch John McCain to see if he’s the old, familiar McCain who was independent-minded and went his own way or if he’s this new, shrunken McCain who never met a rightwing orthodoxy he couldn’t embrace.
Only a little less important was the Israel leg of the trip. Shimon Peres was most effusive, praising Obama’s “moving humanity” and, without exactly saying so, making it crystal clear who his preferred candidate is. The other elements of the Israel dates came off without a hitch. The forces in America and Israel that don’t want a settlement with the Palestinians will perform their mischief between now and November, but they represent a minority viewpoint in America.
Obama still has a lot of convincing to do. And McCain, if the past week was any template, is clearly going to run a very negative campaign. Now that Obama’s back home, he needs to start punching back, since he probably felt constrained from doing so while overseas, and plotting how to make this trip’s ultimate dividends pay out in October.
Tags: amp, bet, debates, israel, the trip, Trip, white house
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Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 4:47 pm under