Barack Obama went abroad to burnish his foreign-policy credentials and trim John McCain’s advantage in that area, and at first it seemed to be working; now that he’s back, though, the trip pretty clearly looks like a political flop. For the first time since Sen. Obama nailed down the Democratic nomination, we have a poll (USA Today/Gallup) showing Sen. McCain in the lead, by four points; in the Rasmussen tracking poll, perhaps the most accurate one out there, Sen. Obama leads by three points, within the margin of error.What went wrong for the Chicago senator? One major thing seems to have been his Berlin speech, in which he greeted his German audience as “a fellow citizen of the world,” apologized for America, went out of his way to avoid crediting the US with saving West Berlin via the Berlin Airlift (for that matter, he also snubbed the Brits for their part in it), and referenced the fall of the Berlin Wall without ever mentioning that that came about because America led the West in standing up to Communism. As a result, his speech doesn’t seem to have impressed much of anyone. A letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune noted dryly, “While America may not be perfect, there is no reason to apologize to the Germans, architects of the Holocaust.” In a commentary in Germany’s Stern magazine sardonically titled “Barack Kant Saves the World,” Florian Güssgen called Sen. Obama “almost too slick” and said, “Obama’s speech was often vague, sometimes banal and more reminiscent of John Lennon’s feel good song ‘Imagine’ than of a foreign policy agenda.” As for the UK, a columnist for the Guardian snidely dismissed the whole thing with a classically British crack: “Barack Obama has found his people. But, unfortunately for his election prospects, they’re German, not American.”It probably didn’t help, further, that he kept the American flag offstage, both for his Berlin speech and during his press conference in Paris with French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy; that could only underscore the impression that Sen. Obama cared more about the opinions of his European audiences than he did of the opinions of American voters, whom the trip was ostensibly intended to impress. The thing that might end up hurting Sen. Obama the most, though, was the incident at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, where he had been scheduled to meet with wounded soldiers. According to reports, the Pentagon informed him that he would not be allowed to bring the news media or his campaign staff, only his official Senate staff; in response, Sen. Obama canceled the visit. Sen. McCain’s response was predictable on every level, as political opportunity combined with a snub he no doubt felt keenly: he attacked.
If Sen. Obama wants to convince skeptics he can handle foreign policy, he’s going to have to do better than this.