Outsmarting the pundits - Obama looking & sounding presidential

By now, readers of this column should know that I was the first person to predict an Obama presidency back in April of last year. Since it took the chattering class of syndicated columnists and TV talking heads until this May to figure out what I had known for over a year, when he’s inaugurated in January I’ll naturally assume the title of America’s Smartest Columnist. I can’t say my prescience was based solely on the stunning power of my own intellect as much as it was because I worked on the Kerry campaign with my friend, Mike Simmons, who had worked for state Senator Obama back in Chicago.

We had gathered outside Washington, D.C., along with about five dozen other activists, to train to open and run canvass offices for a 527 group hired by the DNC. I heard the name “Barack Obama” so many times during that week that it stuck in my head. At one point, then-Chairman, Terry McAuliffe, came to fire up the troops with his usual “I’m rich, I’m Bill Clinton’s best friend, I don’t need to do this, I do this because I love it” speech, but nobody cared. All anyone wanted to know was how he planned to win southern states and how the party intended to use Barack Obama in the campaign. Terry didn’t have a good answer for us on either question, and I knew then that I had to find out more about this Obama guy. His keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention sealed the deal for me and made me understand why whenever I asked Simmons about Obama, he’d smile at me with this look that said, “just wait ‘til you see him.” This summer, the world will be getting its first look the same way I did four years ago.

As soon as it was clear that Barack was going to be the nominee, John McCain’s campaign started trying to tear him down. One of the first things they did was challenge him to travel to Iraq. Senator McCain even offered to travel with him and “educate” him along the way. Fox News was keeping a running count of how long it had been since the last time Senator Obama visited Iraq and the conservative talk shows and blogs went to town on the issue of his foreign policy experience. I find it funny that they never mention our current President’s foreign policy experience when he was sworn in consisted mostly of a few trips across the border to Mexico. In fact, when he took the oath of office, I don’t think his passport had been stamped even once.

What the McCain team didn’t count on was that Senator Obama, who has run maybe the most organized political campaign the country has ever seen, has the best advance people in the business. So when he scheduled a trip to Iraq, it also included stops in Germany, Great Britain, Israel, and Jordan. He’s planning a major speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate (where President Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”), he’ll almost certainly meet with the German Chancellor, the British Prime Minister, the Israeli Prime Minister, and the King of Jordan – all before he arrives in Iraq and meets with that country’s leaders as well as our troops on the ground.

All this will prove that the McCain campaign badly miscalculated their foreign policy offensive against Senator Obama (among many other things) since his meeting with a half-dozen heads of state before sitting down with American military leaders will make him look both presidential and like he’s passed the “Commander in Chief test.” As always, he’ll draw enormous crowds, there will be saturation coverage in the press, and John McCain will have to light what’s left of his hair on fire to get a mention on the Sunday talk shows.

I feel some sympathy for Senator McCain (like I did for Bob Dole back in 1996) because he knows he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hades of winning the election, but he has to go through the motions anyway. Once Barack gets back from his “Summer of Hope” tour, seeing the two of them on stage together will be like looking at one of those New Year’s Eve cartoons with last year represented by a decrepit old man and the New Year represented by a cherubic baby – only the baby has a degree from Harvard Law and a gift for public speaking. It’s just impossible to look at John McCain with the wispy white hair and crooked yellow teeth in that melanoma-stricken face of his and compare it to the classically-handsome visage and thousand-megawatt smile of Barack Obama and think, “this guy is the best hope for America’s future.”