Juxtaposition

After presumptively winning his party’s nomination, the Senator decided to go on a European trip. He travelled to Iraq, Jordan, Israel, France and Britain. He said he would listen to Iraq’s leaders and to America’s generals to guide his policies.

“The people he’s going to meet with are going to try to find out from him what he would do as president,” said Jim Steinberg, the dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and a former deputy national security adviser to President Bill Clinton. “He’s not just a senator. He’s the presumptive nominee.”

His strategists believe that the image of The Senator standing shoulder-to-shoulder with world leaders in world capitals will nonetheless crystallize one of the campaign’s most important themes: that [he] has the experience and foreign policy savvy to be president.

“He will not talk about the presidential race. But to the degree that there are pictures of [him] standing on the world stage next to leaders, he will wear that well,” one strategist said. “Does that resonate well with people back home? Sure it does.”

Enough fooling around.
If you don’t know me,
you’ll soon learn of my love of irony and sarcasm.
The Senator is John McCain.

Most of the preceding paragraphs were lifted almost verbatim from The Washington Post, 14 March, earlier this year. The headline? “McCain on World Stage On Mideast, Europe Trip.” McCain traveled overseas in March after becoming the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. He met with leaders and dignitaries, but his trip did not include a huge rally.

Sunday, speaking at the Presidential Forum of UNITY: Journalists of Color in Chicago, Sen. Barack Obama defended his just-completed trip to the Mideast and Europe. “I was puzzled by this notion that somehow what we were doing was in any way different from what Sen. McCain or a lot of presidential candidates have done in the past. Now, I admit we did it really well,” said the presumptive Democratic nominee. Obama, responding to the McCain campaign’s criticism of his speech in Berlin, noted that McCain gave speeches in Canada, Colombia and Mexico.

[UNITY: Journalists of Color is a coalition of the Asian American Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native American Journalists Association.]

I would note, for the record, that I found it interesting that Sen McCain did not accept an invitation to speak before a conference of minority journalists at the same time as he complains that he’s not getting equal coverage of his campaign as opposed to Sen. Obama. Rather, Sen. McCain chose to spend the weekend at his ranch/cabin/whatever in Sedona, AZ.

And so it goes.

Ciao for now!
Mike