Obama’s foreign mistake?

When one of my students told me that Barack Obama was planning a foreign tour during the summer of election year I thought I’d misheard him. American presidents rarely visit Europe, never mind presidential candidates. But the exercise designed to make him look more presidential may prove to be a tactical error

Obama’s advisers are hoping to see a ‘bump’ from this foreign visit comprising a whistle stop tour of a series of capitals with brief visits with national leaders. But there are suggestions that Obama is acting presumptiously and that he should be concentrating on explaining to American voters what he plans to do about the crisis in the economy.

Today’s Times reports that:

‘He [Obama] has lost a small lead in Colorado, and his ten-point advantage over Mr McCain has dropped to just two in Minnesota.

Although Mr Obama is still favoured to win, other surveys show that many more voters identify with Mr McCain’s “values and background”, and feel they still don’t know Mr Obama. While Mr Obama met Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Wednesday, Mr McCain was holding a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

“For the past two days on talk radio here, pretty much every caller wanted to know why Barack Obama was in Europe and the Middle East rather than talking to people back home about the issues here,” said Andrew Seder, a reporter for the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who covered the McCain event. Mr Obama defended the trip, saying that persuading foreign leaders to send more troops to Afghanistan could save the US billions of dollars.’

It really is hard to work out why Obama only leads McCain by a couple of points when his opponent hails from the same party as a deeply unpopular White House incumbent. Perhaps this tour will help voters connect to Obama and correct his major weakness of not looking experienced or dignified enough. Or it may backfire and prove to be a pivotal point (even at this early stage) in the contest for the presidency.