The headline: "Obama tour staged for political pop"
Or, "EXTREE, EXTREE, OBAMA RUNNING FOR PREZ!"
JERUSALEM — Barack Obama doesn’t travel light.
Halfway around the world, the Obama campaign machine appears as sprawling and seamless as it is on its home turf. As the presumptive Democratic nominee tours five countries in five days, he brings an entourage that would make a pop star envious.
From the saturated media coverage to the one-on-one meetings with heads of state, the trip already had a White House feel. The scope of the traveling staff simply adds to an aura of a president-in-waiting. On Tuesday, aides attempted to invoke White House rules and traditions by requiring reporters to withhold the names of senior advisers who brief the press. But they were reminded twice by reporters that they were not in the White House and that Obama was not the president.
Welcome to the new media narrative, where Obama's winning moments are "staged" and McCain's constant blunders are evidence that he is "real."
In the new media narrative, Obama is unfairly using his youth, his charisma, and the enthusiasm of his army of advisors and supporters to make McCain -- who possesses none of those things -- look foolish.
In the new media narrative, Obama is galavanting and spending money like a Paxil-addled trophy wife on a six-hour lunch, and John McCain is no-frills all the way:
His entourage is smaller than what a president would mobilize for a multinational trip, but dwarfs that of Republican John McCain, who solicits advice from a smaller circle of advisers after 25 years in Congress and numerous trips abroad.
McCain visited the Middle East and Europe in March as part of a congressional delegation, which was paid for by taxpayer dollars, thus limiting the number of staff he could bring.
But when the Arizona senator traveled to Mexico and Colombia last month, he mobilized only eight staff members, including two foreign policy advisers, two press aides, two advance workers and two assistants to Cindy McCain, said campaign spokesman Brian Rogers.
It is shocking -- shocking I tell you! -- that Politico would source such information straight from a campaign spokesman when other sources are certainly available.
It is equally shocking that they would fail to mention John "Hands Off Uncle Sam's Wallet" McCain's famous trip to Iraq in April, 2007:
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) strolled through the open-air Shorja market in Baghdad in an effort to prove that Americans are "not getting the full picture" of what's going on in Iraq. In a press conference after his Baghdad tour, McCain told a reporter that his visit to the market was proof that people could "walk freely" in parts of Baghdad.
What McCain failed to mention was that he was accompanied by "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." He also appeared to be wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit.
Wonder why. Maybe that's because that part of Baghdad is now controlled by the radical Mahdi Army, and since we've given back that turf to the enemy, maybe taxpayers might want John McCain to give back the hundreds of thousands of dollars he wasted on a theatrical production whose goal was to sell the fiction that the Bush-McCain surge has worked.
Nah.
As always, it's good to see the traditional media keeping it real.