Candidates overseas can be more show than tell

When presidential candidates travel abroad there's rarely more to it than show and tell, with the emphasis on show. Barack Obama's high-profile journey to Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East and Europe is all but certain to fit that pattern.

Obama is not going to alter his vow to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq over 16 months or change his call for reinforcements in Afghanistan just because he's now been there to meet U.S. commanders and government leaders. An earlier suggestion that what he learns from his weeklong trip might help him refine his policies drew bitter protests from the Democratic left and taunts from Republicans who said he was changing positions.

He said he was not. To switch on Iraq would demolish his Democratic campaign. That is as obvious as the fact that Gen. David Petraeus disagrees with him on troop withdrawals. Those positions, and Republican John McCain's, were cemented long before Obama's travels.

As was McCain's argument that Obama is inexperienced and unreliable on foreign policy and national defense. Obama's visits to the war zones plus Kuwait, Jordan, Israel and western European capitals won't alter that Republican pressure point. The McCain campaign already is complaining that by sticking to his position, Obama is ignoring the generals he's just seen.

All on script, on both sides.

It has been nearly 60 years since a political leader's trip to a war zone had a real impact on American policy. The leader was Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected in 1952 after a campaign in which he promised that "I shall go to Korea." That meant that he would end an unpopular war, and he did, six months into his presidency.

He went to Korea secretly as president-elect, saw the battlefield with his general's eye, and came away convinced that the war had to be ended quickly.

Obama's mission is a far different one. He's trying to present himself as a potential president capable of dealing with foreign crises and leaders. One trip isn't going to overcome the inexperience rap.

Obama said going in that he plans to do more listening than talking, and as long as he doesn't misspeak when he does talk, the trip will serve his purpose.

So will the exposure it brings, with big name television anchors flying over to interview him abroad. Coverage in Afghanistan and Iraq was limited, but a press entourage met him in Amman and will travel with him the rest of the way.

That bugs the Republicans, who are demanding similar media treatment for their candidate. McCain did not get it on his latest overseas trip, to Colombia and Mexico, but his campaign didn't encourage reporters to go along. Nor were reporters invited to cover him when he went to Iraq, for the eighth time, and on to Europe in March.

That was the trip on which he said the U.S. military surge he supported and Obama opposed had been so successful that he could walk freely through a marketplace that was too embattled to visit before. Later, TV tape turned up showing that he was in battlefield protective gear, with 100 troops and three helicopters escorting him.

When McCain did speak to reporters about the trip, in Amman, he mixed up Shiites and Sunnis. He said Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, was training and supporting al-Qaida, which is Sunni. Sen. Joseph Lieberman got his ear and whispered a correction, which McCain repeated.

McCain's blunder stirred a brief flap, but no more. For Obama on this trip, even a minor mistake would be a major blow to his mission.

He has to be careful with his proposals and pledges. Even a hint that he is undercutting President Bush would backfire badly. He avoided discussing troop withdrawal plans with Iraqi leaders who, ironically, did so for him. A spokesman in Baghdad said the government hopes U.S. combat forces could be out of Iraq by 2010. That would fall roughly within Obama's 16-month timetable.

The White House has offered to discuss "a general time horizon" with the Iraqis, but with no arbitrary deadlines. That at least blurs the line between Obama's plan and McCain's adamant opposition to timed withdrawals.

Other presidential candidates have tried travel as visual evidence of foreign policy know-how. It seldom made a significant imprint on the campaign. One notable exception involved a trip the candidate made before he was one.

George Romney went to Saigon during the Vietnam War in 1965 as governor of Michigan, and what he said about it two years later was his political undoing. Romney had gone with a delegation of governors who got a guided tour and briefings by the U.S. Embassy and the generals. He'd come back as a supporter of the war, then changed his mind, and said in a TV interview in 1967 that "when I came back from Vietnam, I'd just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get." He never lived down the word and went from front-runner to flop before the 1968 Republican primaries even began.

It was the wrong word, but not far from accurate. Every official visitor to Saigon in those LBJ years got the treatment - briefings and tours meant to show that U.S. war policy was succeeding, which wasn't so.

When Eisenhower went to Korea in November 1952, senior U.S. generals and the South Korean government wanted to take the offensive against the North. Eisenhower didn't listen to them. He went to the front lines, talked with the men there and their commanders, flew a reconnaissance mission, and concluded that the situation was intolerable. Biographer Stephen E. Ambrose wrote that Eisenhower had made up his mind that the war had to be ended as quickly as possible on the best terms he could get, and "this instinctive judgment was reinforced by his study of the terrain."

The terrain Obama is traveling isn't military, it is political. Cover it carefully and confidently, and his travel will be broadening. Stumble, and he will suffer.

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EDITOR'S NOTE - Walter R. Mears reported on presidential campaigns for The Associated Press from 1960 until 2000. He is retired and lives in Chapel Hill, N.C.