Commentary - Mary Katharine Ham: A world tour hits sour notes

Naturally, the grand success required a world tour befitting it, complete with a grand spectacle. As such, Fleetwood incorporated a 70-foot inflatable penguin into the stage show that was meant to take flight at the culmination of the performance.

The penguin spent most of the tour in a disappointing state of flaccidity.

“It would never fully inflate,” Lindsey Buckingham remembered. “This thing was limping and floundering at the back of the stage. It never flew.”

Barack Obama, riding high on his successes during the Democratic primary and momentum over John McCain, never fully inflated during his overseas tour last week. His soaring rhetoric and big promises, sketched confidently with visions of Spinal Tappian grandeur on the napkin of American politics, became an 18-inch Stonehenge when lowered onto the world stage.

When one makes all the world his stage, he runs the risk of looking like a very small actor.

Liberal columnist Richard Cohen of The Washington Post this week noted Obama’s thin resume, consisting almost entirely of good speechifying. “I know that Barack Obama is a near-perfect political package,” he wrote. “I’m still not sure, though, what’s in it.”

To their credit, the national media, seemingly cowed by criticism of their obvious Obamamania, spent some time on the tour trying to figure out exactly what is in the package.

Katie Couric of CBS asked how many troops would be in the residual force Obama would leave in Iraq post-withdrawal. He replied with characteristic circuity. That even elicited a crinkled brow from Couric.

ABC’s Terry Moran asked, “If you had to do it over again, knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?” Obama’s answer — “No. ... These kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult.” — got the same response from Moran as it did from many voters.

“You wouldn’t?”

ABC’s Charlie Gibson grilled Obama on Jerusalem, drawing an admission that the senator was unfamiliar with Foreign Policy 101 at his June speech to AIPAC, during which he said Jerusalem should remain undivided. He subsequently backed away from the statement upon being briefed that Jerusalem is a contentious issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A frustrated Huffington Post blogger noted that The Associated Press, Time magazine, National Journal, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe used the words “presumptuous” or “arrogant” in their coverage of Obama’s world tour.

The formerly unmockable man became the subject of the year’s most-read satire — Gerard Baker’s “He ventured forth to bring light to the world” in The London Times.

Conservatives who had generally allowed that Obama gave a good speech began to wonder aloud how long the great orator could pass for great giving the same speech for 16 months.

“When I first heard this ... I have to confess my American soul was stirred ...” wrote David Brooks in The New York Times. “But now it is more than half a year on ... and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony.”

Back home, fighting 10-to-1 coverage of Obama’s jet-setting and suffering the sub-par staging of the Sausage Haus, McCain had a surprisingly good week.

A midweek headline — “McCain makes significant gains in four key battleground states” — presaged Obama’s transient bounce in the polls, which showed up briefly in Gallup and Rasmussen daily tracking polls, but disappeared days later.

Perhaps the peril of courting young voters with Facebook attention spans is that gains are lost when your constituency returns to uploading photos of themselves playing beer pong.

McCain won a victory on Obama turf, beating the Democrat’s YouTube channel traffic during most of last week, thanks to “Obama Love” — a montage of drooling media coverage of Obama — and “Pump,” an attack ad on the oil drilling issue.

Obama later handed McCain a victory when he passed on a meeting with wounded troops in Germany, after which his disciplined message machine offered no fewer than 11 conflicting statements as to why.

Obama’s rationale for his candidacy is that he’s a “new” kind of politician with a preternatural ability to inspire. His overseas overreach pricked a hole in both ideas. It may be a slow leak, but Obama’s soaring campaign is in danger of becoming a flaccid, flightless bird.

Mary Katharine Ham is online editor of dcexaminer.com.