World Stage Gives Obama an Edge on His Challengers
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Doug Mills/The New York TimesPresident Obama, in a speech at Trinity College in Dublin, celebrated the enduring bond between the Irish and Americans. Starting a bid to unseat an incumbent president, as Tim Pawlenty did Monday afternoon, often leads to a comparison between the would-be challenger and the leader of the free world.
And as the former governor of Minnesota found, the contrast is not always a favorable one.
Steve Pope/Getty ImagesTim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, announces that he is running for president at the State Historical Building in Des Moines. Even as Mr. Pawlenty stood in front of a crowd of about 200 in Des Moines to formally declare his candidacy, the president took the stage before a crowd of more than 25,000 cheering Irish residents on the first leg of a week-long European trip.
Cable news offered a snippet of Mr. Pawlenty?s announcement before shifting quickly to Mr. Obama?s speech, which was interrupted repeatedly by applause and carried in its entirety.
The dueling speeches highlighted the political reality that presidents command the world stage at precisely the moment that their challengers purposely scale down their messages to appeal to primary voters in tiny towns in a handful of early-voting states.
And with Mr. Obama, in particular, the speech was a reminder of how his 2008 campaign was able to produce striking images of the candidate in front of tens of thousands of adoring fans. Throughout 2008, Mr. Obama?s campaign stage-managed massive rallies that went unmatched by Republicans until the Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, joined the ticket as the vice presidential nominee.
The comparisons between Mr. Obama?s speech in Dublin and Mr. Pawlenty?s in Iowa were reminiscent of a similar moment in the summer of the last presidential campaign.
Mr. Obama, already drawing huge crowds, staged a campaign tour through Europe, culminating in a speech in Berlin, at the base of the Victory Column in the Tiergarten, before hundreds of thousands of Germans. Networks carried the speech live, with shots of a seemingly endless crowd.
Unable to compete with those images, Senator John McCain of Arizona chose to make fun of his predicament. During Mr. Obama?s speech, Mr. McCain visited Schmidt?s Restaurant und Sausage Haus in the German Village section of Columbus, Ohio. The restaurant?s menu proclaimed its food to be ?The Best of the Wurst!?
Such were the size and energy of Mr. Obama?s rallies that the campaign managers for Mr. McCain began derisively calling him ?The One.?
For the current crop of Republicans hoping to unseat Mr. Obama, the situation is likely to be even more difficult. As president, Mr. Obama is provided numerous opportunities to command attention ? on foreign trips, visits to storm-damaged cities, or announcements of successful military operations.
There are times when the glare can work against a president. One recent example was the split-screen images of Mr. Obama being forced to release his birth certificate even as Donald J. Trump, the real estate mogul and TV celebrity, held an impromptu news conference with reporters in New Hampshire.
But for the most part, Mr. Obama will benefit by having a job that operates on a different scale than that of a presidential challenger.
In Iowa, Mr. Pawlenty invited the direct comparisons by taking on Mr. Obama and his policies in Washington directly.
?President Obama doesn?t have an economic plan. He just has a campaign plan. America deserves much better,? Mr. Pawlenty declared. ?We?ve tried Barack Obama?s way, and his way has failed. Three years into his term, we?re no longer just running out of money. We?re running out of time.?
But in a reminder of the challenges facing a challenger, Mr. Pawlenty?s announcement video that was posted Sunday night found itself competing for news coverage with the killer tornadoes that swept through the middle of the country that night.
The Pawlenty story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press ran on the obituary page.
World Stage Gives Obama an Edge on His Challengers
Presidents command the largest of stages ? the world ? at precisely the moment that their challengers are purposely going small.
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Source: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/world-stage-gives-obama-an-edge-on-his-challengers/
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