Foreigners.(The Talk of the Town)(Barack Obama's trip to Middle East and Europe)

Back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, candidates for President of the United States didn't have much truck with foreigners. They didn't vote, they lived on the other side of the ocean, and they spoke funny, most of 'em. (If a Frenchman is a man, Jim points out to Huck Finn, "why doan' he talk like a man?") Even after America's rise to global power, the only overseas travel seen as obligatory for a Presidential hopeful was to what pols called the Three-I League--Ireland, Italy, and Israel, venues that had more to do with the lingering tribal identities of big-city ethnics than with anything as highfalutin as foreign policy. (Let us note, in the currently fashionable spirit of joke-explaining, that the baseball allusion is to a long-defunct Class B circuit made up of teams from Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa.) Nor did the incumbent get around much during the first fifty-four years of his life. "Bush's foreign travels," the Associated Press reported a few days after the Supreme Court awarded him custody of Air Force One, "have been limited to three visits to Mexico, two trips to Israel, a three-day Thanksgiving visit in Rome with one of his daughters in 1998, and a six-week excursion to China with his parents in 1975." Israel, check. Italy, check. He didn't bother with the third I.

In our post-9/11, post-unipolar, and soon-to-be-post-Bush world, staying home is not an option--especially if you're the "inexperienced" candidate and the opinion polls say that your war-hero opponent is better at foreign policy and national security than you are. Anyway, John McCain had spent months needling Barack Obama for not having lately visited the fourth I. So, last week, off to Iraq he went--and, while he was at it, he doubled and redoubled down, adding Afghanistan, Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, Germany, France, and Britain to his itinerary.

Just before the trip, a leading wire service summarized the prevailing view:

WASHINGTON (Reuters)--U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's overseas trip will be a high-risk debut on the world stage--with the potential pitfalls at least as numerous as the likely rewards.

"On a trip like this, on a stage like this, there is no room for error," Tad Devine, a veteran Democratic operative, told ABC News. "He needs to make sure every word is right, every setting is proper, and that he makes absolutely no mistakes." And Newsweek's Richard Wolffe predicted that the trip would be "an extraordinarily public test of a Presidential contender's mastery of world affairs."

Whether or not it was that, it was certainly a test of his mastery of political theatrics, his sure-footedness, and his willingness to take a calculated risk. On the first leg of the trip, Obama found himself in a military gym in Kuwait, a major staging point for Americans going to the war zones. The bleachers were packed with soldiers wearing fatigues. A basketball materialized. "I may not make the first one," he said, no doubt imag-ining what a metaphor-hungry press would make of a miss or, God forbid, a whole string of misses, "but I'll make one eventually." With a spring of his toes, he put the ball up. When it came down, swish.

It was the three-point shot heard round the world, and, for the Obama campaign, things only got better from there. As the candidate whirled through Afghanistan and Iraq--talking with troops, huddling with generals, conferring with presidents and prime ministers--the policy dominoes suddenly began toppling his way, flicked by unexpected fingers. Commanders on the ground in Afghanistan made known their belief that more NATO troops are badly needed there, as Obama has been arguing all along. The Bush Administration sent an Under-Secretary of State to a meeting in Geneva with Iran's chief nuclear ...