Dana Milbank writes a sketch of the Brown-"Boosh" meeting but otherwise the American media were not interested in the relationship between "the most consistently unpopular president since Truman" and the Prime Minister whose "support has plunged faster than Neville Chamberlain's after he appeased Hitler."
Posted on the left is a screen capture of today's RealClearPolitics - the gateway website to American politics. There's not one mention of Broon's visit.
Barack Obama is still hot favourite to be the Democrats' nominee but the questions about him are mounting. Peggy Noonan and David Brooks (conservative commentators) capture them:
- Inexperienced: "It is the moment of Obama. And now his problem emerges. It is two-headed. It is not that he is African-American, or half so, and it is not that he is liberal. Liberalism too, one senses, is having a moment. It is his youth, his relative untriedness, the fact that he has not suffered, been seasoned, been beat about the head by life and left struggling back, as happens to most adults by a certain time." - Noonan in the Wall Street Journal
- Not so different from other politicians: "He sprinkled his debate performance Wednesday night with the sorts of fibs, evasions and hypocrisies that are the stuff of conventional politics. He claimed falsely that his handwriting wasn’t on a questionnaire about gun control. He claimed that he had never attacked Clinton for her exaggerations about the Tuzla airport, though his campaign was all over it. Obama piously condemned the practice of lifting other candidates’ words out of context, but he has been doing exactly the same thing to John McCain, especially over his 100 years in Iraq comment." - David Brooks in the New York Times
If Obama bombed in the ABC debate... so did ABC. Lots and lots of complaints about the focus on "gotcha" moments rather than real issues. See here.
Interesting post at Politico re McCain's strategy. Politico's Jonathan Martin analyses McCain's organisation and his plan to "drive a triangulated contrast between himself, the Democratic nominee and President Bush."
I'll post later on Brown's speech on anti-Americanism/ America's role in the world.
