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Barack Obama’s advisers insist his coming trip abroad is not a campaign swing. Even so, the high-profile journey has all the trappings of a rock-star tour.The Illinois senator’s trip to Europe and the Middle East has generated so much interest that all three TV network news anchors are planning to accompany the candidate.Foreign media have reported daily on the impending visit. And the campaign revealed Friday that Obama intends to meet with top U.S. allies. Obama is surely looking to burnish his foreign policy credentials overseas-but on the back end of it, his superstar persona might get the biggest boost. “What you’re about to see is enormous publicity,” Democratic strategist Susan Estrich said. “He’s got three anchors coming with him. He’s got the glitterati of the press corps.”With his visit, the presumptive Democratic nominee is recreating the kind of public whirlwind that he enjoyed at the height of the Democratic primary — only on a global scale.When John McCain made a similar trip overseas in March, he was accompanied by a few dozen members of the U.S. media. No network anchors made the journey. Granted, it was his eighth visit to Iraq, but it was his first since clinching the GOP nomination, which he had done just days earlier.This time, the traveling press could dwarf McCain’s entourage. In terms of media frenzies, it’s the difference between a flea circus and the Big Top.According to the Obama camp, the 40 seats on the campaign plane have already been filled, after 200 reporters applied.Add to that the security detail that will accompany him.Unlike McCain, who traveled to Iraq when he was not under the protection of the Secret Service,Obama is going overseas under the watchful eyes of both the Secret Service and foreign law enforcement.Obama’s advisers stressed Friday that the Illinois senator is not trying to play the role of president.“The broad goals of the trip are to deepen, even further, important relationships and to exchange views with the leaders in several countries whose partnership with the United States is really critical to our national security,” foreign policy adviser Susan Rice said on a conference call with reporters.“It is important to note that it is not our intent to make policy or to negotiate. We won’t do so. There is one president of the United States at any given time and we will certainly honor and respect that.”They rattled off an itinerary that includes meetings with, among others, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.The Drudge Report reported Friday that there are elevated security concerns, particularly with his potential visits to Israel and the West Bank.But Ron Williams, a former Secret Service agent, told FOX News that ironically Obama “may be safer there than campaigning in the United States.”Williams said that so long as Obama sticks to his meetings with foreign dignitaries and avoids public appearances the crowds will be thoroughly vetted.“Of course, it’s gonna be tense,” he said, adding that Obama, as a presumptive nominee, will get the same level of protection as President Bush.Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley would not confirm the size of Obama’s security detail or whether there were elevated concerns, but he said the fact that Obama is a presumptive nominee traveling abroad so close to the convention means “it’s certainly going to gain more attention.”He said Obama’s massive entourage shouldn’t make it more challenging to protect him.“Imagine when the president travels — he’s got a large contingent that goes with him as well. That doesn’t hamper our ability to protect him,” Wiley said.But all the hubbub raises questions about how much fact-finding will actually take place when Obama travels to war zones as part of a congressional delegation, and elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe with his campaign.“I’ve taken many congressional delegations overseas-You’ll learn more about a country by watching the History Channel than you will doing this,” Democratic strategist Bob Beckel told FOX News.With the intense international interest, Beckel said the pressure is high for Obama not to slip up.“He cannot afford to make a policy error or a statement error or else it will be magnified far beyond what it would otherwise be,” he said.Estrich said the trip gives him a platform to fend off McCain’s foreign policy attacks.While the networks are taking some heat for devoting so many resources to the trip, McCain aides have accused Obama of staging an overseas campaign “rally.”McCain gave a different message Thursday, saying that Obama’s trip to the two war zones is welcome and long overdue.On Friday, McCain added that Obama “would be going to a very different Iraq” if the U.S. military had listened to his advice about withdrawing troops.“There would be chaos. There would be an increase in sectarian violence. There would be widening Iranian influence, and we would be facing disaster — certainly if not disaster, a lost war,” he said.McCain also launched an attack on Obama in a new television ad accusing him of switching positions on Iraq “to help himself become president.”The 30-second ad, wich will run on national cable and in 11 battleground states, is McCain’s first negative TV ad aimed at Obama.The McCain ad’s announcer says Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan, hasn’t been to Iraq in years and opposed war funding. The announcer says these positions helped Obama win the Democratic nomination but he’s changing now to become president.Obama spokesman Bill Burton called it a “patently misleading negative ad.”“Given his calls for a civil campaign, it’s disappointing that Senator McCain has slipped so easily into the same, tired campaign tactics that have become so familiar to the American people,” Burton said.Burton also said reports Friday that the U.S. and Iraq may agree to a “general time horizon” for reductions in troop levels is a “step in the right direction.”
As in the days of Noah....
