Obama’s trip has dealt him new cards to play at home on Home Services

Jul

Obama’s trip has dealt him new cards to play at home

posted by admin in Home Inspection

He must, however, be pretty pleased overall. While the trip will not have the effect of making Americans en masse rise up and carry his banner and declare the election over, I think it’s safe to say that he’s banked some goodwill and credibility whose domestic political benefits will reveal themselves slowly and become more apparent this autumn, perhaps especially during the three presidential debates.

This voter undoubtedly knows that Obama just took a big trip and will have seen the images, and may even be able to name one substantive thing that happened during the trip. But this voter still doesn’t know that much about Obama. She or he is going to have to spend a lot of timing watching him over the course of the autumn and thinking about whether to put him in the White House just as she or he is going to watch John McCain to see if he’s the old, familiar McCain who was independent-minded and went his own way or if he’s this new, shrunken McCain who never met a rightwing orthodoxy he couldn’t embrace.

Most notable among them is Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s stated support for Obama’s withdrawal timetable. That July Christmas gift will enable Obama to say, in the debates and on the stump, that he and the Iraqi leader George Bush’s man in Baghdad, no less are on the same page about the future.

And finally, Obama is substantively right to talk about the strategic importance of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban have regrouped and al-Qaida is amassed. His successful meetings in Afghanistan reinforce that message.