Obama trip hailed a success

Barack Obama's high-profile overseas trip was being hailed as a success by many back home in America today.

Lauded as an "impressive figure" who now has "an album of enviable images with generals, rank-and-file troops and world leaders" to boost his foreign policy credentials, Mr Obama travelled to Britain to add Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron to his scrapbook.

But the much-hyped week-long visit to Europe and the Middle East has not gone without question - with US political pundits wondering whether the Democratic US presidential hopeful will get carried away on the wave of emotion, and what he is doing overseas just three months from the general election anyway.

His speech yesterday, to a mile-long crowd of 200,000 people in Berlin's Tiergarten Park, drew larger crowds than he has ever done in America.

"The overseas gathering in the midst of a presidential campaign was seemingly without precedent in American history," declared the Boston Globe.

The New York Times said the images, which were broadcast live on TV screens across the world, showed "a candidate who could restore the world's faith in strong American leadership and idealism".

But its front-page headline added: "Obama, Vague on Issues, Pleases Crowd in Europe."

In New York's Daily News, under the headline "Obama's got the whole world in his hands; McCain looks flatfooted," opinion editor Josh Greenman said: "Obama's overseas trip produces an album of enviable images with generals, rank-and-file troops and world leaders - and no real missteps.

"You can't buy this kind of press. And if you could, only his campaign could afford it."

But he warned: "A few times this week, Obama could be heard imagining himself as a second-term President. Easy, there."

This cautionary note echoed criticism of Mr Obama's trip made by campaign officials for his Republican rival John McCain, who have said the speech showed Mr Obama was presumptuous about the presidency.

But, referring to Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's support for a timetable for US troop withdrawals, Charles Krauthammer, of the Daily News, wrote: "Obama was likely to be President anyway. He is likelier now still."

The Chicago Tribune, in Mr Obama's home state of Illinois, said the 46-year-old senator was "cutting an impressive figure" overseas in an editorial headlined "Fawning over Obama".

The paper also defended itself over accusations that the news media was having a "love affair" with Mr Obama and that it was biased in its coverage.

"The obviously unbalanced amount of coverage doesn't mean that this newspaper or others chronicling Obama's trip are biased against McCain," it said.

"It means that Obama's first trip to the Middle East and Europe is bigger news this week than what McCain's been doing."

And one blog, NewsBlues.com, noted how the US media were lining up to show they were the ones with access to the presidential hopeful.

"ABC's Terry Moran landed an EXCLUSIVE interview with Barack Obama yesterday, one day after Lara Logan's EXCLUSIVE interview with Obama on CBS, and one day before Katie Couric's EXCLUSIVE interview with Obama, and two days before Chuck Gibson's EXCLUSIVE interview with Obama, and three days before Brian Williams's EXCLUSIVE interview."

On Fox News, Fred Barnes, executive editor of conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, said Mr Obama's speech was "high minded stuff" which was "just too grandiose for me", while Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call thought the trip had been viewed as a success in the US.

"I think this whole trip has been good for him," he said.

"John McCain sort of goaded him into going. He went, and, generally speaking, he has been well received, and I think the images played back well in the United States."

But Mr Obama's world tour has not gone without question.

Earlier today, CNN's Candy Crowley asked Mr Obama: "We're a month away from your convention, we're three months away from this election, and we're sitting in Berlin. Why is that?"

He replied that the main purpose of his trip was to visit Iraq and Afghanistan, and part of "getting that right" was having the Europeans engaged and involved in the battle against terrorism.

And the New York Times' David Brooks was also sceptical.

"When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred.

"It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign.

"But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony.

"The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more."

Interesting? Click here to explore further