is what the UK Independent called Barack Obama today:
Gordon Brown's political nightmare will continue to haunt him today when he welcomes to Downing Street the man who is arguably the world's most popular politician.
That famous lime green backdrop McCain used is starting to make more sense: The green of jealousy is McCain's natural color.
And Bush must be feeling even worse when he reads things like this LA Times headline:
"Obama's popularity as anti-Bush is telling"
To continue with the LA Times story:
Barack Obama's electoral rival is John McCain, but Obama's overseas trip this week has given heartburn to another Republican -- President Bush.
...
The trip had to come as a jolt for administration officials, said Wayne White, a senior State Department intelligence official in Bush's first term. "I'm sure it was a bit rattling for the administration to see someone treated with such deference," he said.
Diplomats are good at understatement, aren't they?
In Israel, where back in May Bush lambasted Obama in all but name for saying he would try talking to the Iranians,
The Israelis said they were willing to accept Obama's plans to talk to top Iranian leaders as a means of exhausting diplomatic possibilities.
This is called leadership, in case you can't recognize it any more after 8 years of Bush/Cheney.
Meanwhile, back at the Independent:
Mr Brown could have bathed in the reflected glory of the Democratic presidential candidate by holding a joint press conference with him today after their scheduled 45-minute meeting. However, he is forbidden by protocol from doing this as he did not hold a press conference with John McCain, the Republican candidate, last May.
M. Sarkozy threw such diplomatic niceties to the winds yesterday, having allowed Mr McCain to answer journalists' questions alone outside the Elysée Palace during his visit. The French President, whose popularity ratings are as dismal as those of Mr Brown, clearly hoped for a "bounce" as he revelled in the presence of Mr Obama, whom he described as "my mate" in Le Figaro.
And the Guardian took note of how Obama is learning to handle McCain's "base" - the press:
The Democratic presidential candidate and his media team turned the mood around as they travelled from Israel to the West Bank and on to Germany and France, with the final stop in London today. The press corps was appeased when Obama, who prefers to sit on planes with his iPod and press cuttings or a book, ignoring staff and journalists, made a rare trip to the back of the Boeing en route from Israel to banter with reporters. Even rarer, he had an off-the-record dinner with them, at a French restaurant in Berlin on Thursday.
The restoration of relations with the press shows in the coverage he received throughout the week. He has been hailed as presidential, cable networks covered his Berlin speech live and almost every major US paper carried on their front pages a picture of him in front of a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin.
(The Guardian overlooks some of the sniping the press still indulges in, the New York Times, for example, calling his Berlin speech "vague"; on the other hand, the Times did a nice piece on his London visit, and they described his stop in France as "3 Hours in Paris, and Smiles All Around", with a great photo of him and Sarkozy. So maybe things are improving.)
And oh, yes, McCain is jealous:
"With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to 'the people of the world,' I'm starting to feel a little left out," McCain said in an address focused largely on the domestic economy. "Maybe you are, too." LA Times: Obama meets with British PM, turns focus to U.S. economy
To which Obama responded:
"It doesn't strike me that we've done anything different than what the McCain campaign has done, which is to recognize that part of the job of being president and commander in chief is to forge effective relationships with our allies," he said.
A main goal of the trip, he said, was to give allied leaders and the American public "some sense of where an Obama administration might take our foreign policy."
This trip will not sell the isolationists who think we should care nothing for the world's opinion of us, but then nothing Obama could do will sell himself to that crowd.
So the risk paid off. Not just in establishing Obama's credentials in foreign policy and world leadership, but in his handling of the press. On that last point, he has also been helped by the fact that McCain's gaffes, stumbles and general lack of gravitas (a/k/a boorishness) have gotten too noticeable for everyone except Faux Noise to ignore.