What he did instead
Maureen Dowd interviewed Senator Obama about his trip to the gym rather than to visit wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the largest military hospital outside the United States:
In Berlin, the tabloid Bild sent an attractive blonde reporter to stalk Obama at the Ritz-Carlton gym as he exercised with his body man, Reggie Love. She then wrote a tell-all, enthusing, “I’m getting hot, and not from the workout,” and concluding, “What a man.”
Obama marveled: “I’m just realizing what I’ve got to become accustomed to. The fact that I was played like that at the gym. Do you remember ‘The Color of Money’ with Paul Newman? And Forest Whitaker is sort of sitting there, acting like he doesn’t know how to play pool. And then he hustles the hustler. She hustled us. We walk into the gym. She’s already on the treadmill. She looks like just an ordinary German girl. She smiles and sort of waves, shyly, but doesn’t go out of her way to say anything. As I’m walking out, she says: ‘Oh, can I have a picture? I’m a big fan.’ Reggie takes the picture.”
Senator Obama says it’s all the Pentagon’s fault that he didn’t visit the troops, but the Washington Post reported that that explanation doesn’t hold water. John McCain said: “if I had been told by the Pentagon that I couldn’t visit those troops, and I was there and wanted to be there, I guarantee you, there would have been a seismic event.”
What’s most interesting to us is Senator Obama’s breezy discussion of Hollywood movies and pop culture, as though the matter was no big deal. After all, as Dowd reported, the Senator had bigger fish to fry:
“One of the values of this trip for me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about…It’s so easy to get sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, finding some clever retort for whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I’m not doing my job, which should be to raise up some big important issues.”…He thinks most people recognize that “there is a concrete advantage to not only foreign leaders, but foreign populations liking the American president, because it makes it easier for Sarkozy to send troops into Afghanistan if his voting base likes the United States.”
So the President of France will commit troops in his nation’s interests more easily if “foreign populations like the American president?” Note how the French troops appear to be but pawns in a global popularity contest. Apparently they fare no better than our soldiers at Landstuhl.
July 27th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
The Obama people’s version is that the military made a last-minute reclassification of the Landstuhl visit as a campaign event; that, because of the ensuing sudden logistical complications, Obama chose to phone the wounded troops at Landstuhl; and that Obama had just visited wounded troops in Iraq.
I don’t entirely buy this–my sense is that Obama could have gotten to Landstuhl if he’d really wanted to–, but IMO the situation is not as clearcut as some partisans on the right claim.
I don’t know the net impact of this affair on independent voters. This independent voter thought the McCain campaign was hitting its stride with the Obama-media-love ad (warning: some Web links to the video have been short-lived and this one may be too), but the stridency of Landstuhl criticism strikes me as a step backward.
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If the Republicans think they’ll win this thing with negative campaigning, in all likelihood they are grievously mistaken. The 1988 contest was won with negative GOP campaigning, but it followed a successful Republican Presidency.
July 28th, 2008 at 3:48 am
Afterthought: so what should the Republicans have done? McCain, as quoted by Dinocrat, made a good start:
This makes McCain’s temper work for him: it implies that President McCain will not be maneuvered by ploys from bureaucrats and other players, but will be President. The McCain people should have contrasted that single statement with all the equivocations from the Obama campaign–but such points should be made with a rapier, not a bludgeon.