Monday, July 28, 2008
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FROM THE TRAIL
Back To Business
Amid Mixed Reviews From His Trip Abroad, Obama Refocuses On Domestic Issues
CHICAGO -- Eight countries, eight days, thousands of miles and little sleep -- so went Barack Obama's fast-paced swing through Europe and the Middle East last week, a trip that was by many accounts a success, but was not without its flaws.
Campaign 2008From The Trail
NBC/National Journal embed reporters file regular dispatches on their experiences from the trail.
Previously in this series:
• World Tour '08 (07/25/08)
• Straight Talk? (07/22/08)
Read The Entire Series
At least one recent poll, Gallup's daily tracker, gave Obama a significant bounce after the tour. But hours after landing back in Chicago on Sunday, he appeared to want to dampen expectations as he spoke to a gathering of minority journalists, remarking that he wasn't sure whether the tour would have any immediate positive impact. He argued that the American people were most worried about the economy these days, and he said he would be focusing on economic issues "for the duration."
He said he was pleased that the housing bill had been passed and that President Bush planned to sign it, but that more must be done. And Obama again pressed Congress to pass a second economic stimulus package to spur the economy.
Monday in Washington, Obama brought together a team of economic advisers -- including former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker; former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Paul O'Neill; New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine; billionaire investor Warren Buffett; Google chairman Eric Schmidt; and SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger -- to talk about strategies for strengthening the economy.
But while Obama may have been all business today, he took the opportunity on Sunday to evaluate last week's tour, defending himself against criticism that it was "audacious" of him to travel abroad in the middle of a general election campaign.
"I basically met with the same folks that John McCain met with after he won the nomination," he said, adding that the Arizona senator had also made trips to Mexico, Canada and Colombia "and nobody suggested that that was 'audacious.'"
"Now, I admit we did it really well," he went on to say. "But that shouldn't be a strike against me."
The foreign swing was an important one for the first-term senator, meant to burnish his foreign policy credentials and show American voters that he could hold his own on the world stage.
Obama said it had allowed him to establish relationships and "a certain bond of trust" with key leaders around the world that would be helpful should he be elected president.
Despite the near-daily statements from his campaign that he was not going to try to negotiate or make policy while abroad, and his repetition of the line "America has one president at a time," the tour had many of the trappings of one by a head of state.
This was nowhere more apparent than in Paris, where Obama flew on the heels of his speech to a crowd of over 200,000 in Berlin. Obama spent only about six hours in France, and there was no American flag to accompany the French one behind the matching podiums at the packed press conference at the Elysee Palace, yet when Obama and President Nicolas Sarkozy emerged to greet the hushed throng of reporters from beneath a glittering chandelier, the image was of two men on seemingly equal footing, despite the fact that only one of them was a president.
In the end, the trip -- purposefully devoid of any new policy prescriptions -- was more about images and perceptions than it was about actual news. The Obama campaign gave John McCain at least one opening when it mishandled the explanation of its decision to cancel a planned visit to troops at Landstuhl in Germany, providing reporters with multiple versions of how the trip came to be canceled.