NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube get the skinny on the abrupt cancellation of Barack Obama’s visit to Landstuhl and Ramstein yesterday. The campaign tried to excuse it by claiming that it wouldn’t be appropriate to visit while on a campaign-funded portion of his trip, but that wasn’t the real problem. When Obama found out he couldn’t use the visit as a photo op, he canceled:
One military official who was working on the Obama visit said because political candidates are prohibited from using military installations as campaign backdrops, Obama’s representatives were told, “he could only bring two or three of his Senate staff member, no campaign officials or workers.” In addition, “Obama could not bring any media. Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama’s visit.”
The official said “We didn’t know why” the request to visit the wounded troops was withdrawn. “He (Obama) was more than welcome. We were all ready for him.”
This snubbing doesn’t shock me at all, but it does reinforce the assesment I made of the man a year ago or so.
As Ed suggests, what we have here is Obama kicking the injured vets to the side of the road when he and his people see that they won’t be able to use them as props for his election effort. There’s no other way this can be taken.
If he thinks for one second that the American people aren’t going to remember this come November, he’s sadly mistaken.
Others:
Weekly Standard Blog, The Campaign Spot, Redstate Patterico’s Pontifications
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July 25th, 2008 at 13:36
Now lets talk about what really happened.
Really bit, trying to use wounded vets to score political points? But I forget that you are of the “I support the troops, I wear a flag pin” ilk.
Pentagon Confirms That It Told Obama He Couldn’t Visit Army Base With Campaign Staff
By Greg Sargent – July 25, 2008, 11:13AM
I’ve just gotten clarification from the Pentagon on what really happened with regard to Barack Obama’s canceled visit to an Army base in Germany, something the McCain campaign has been using to hit Obama since yesterday.
A Pentagon spokesperson confirms to me that because of longstanding Department of Defense regulations, Pentagon officials told Obama aides that he couldn’t visit the base with campaign staff. This left Obama with little choice but to cancel the trip, since the plan to visit with campaign aides had been in the works for weeks.
The Obama campaign yesterday announced that it had decided to cancel the visit to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, saying that it would be “inappropriate” to make such a visit as part of a campaign trip.
The McCain camp has nonetheless been using Obama’s canceled trip to insinuate that he’s anti-troops. “Barack Obama is wrong,” McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers said in a statement yesterday. “It is never ‘inappropriate’ to visit our men and women in the military.”
But it turns out that the Pentagon did in fact tell Obama that in this case, it was not only “inappropriate,” but against DOD rules, for him to conduct the visit with campaign staff.
“We have longstanding Department of Defense policy in regards to political campaigns and elections,” Pentagon spokesperson Elizabeth Hibner told me. “We informed the Obama staff that he was more than welcome to visit as Senator Obama, with Senate staff. However, he could not conduct the visit with campaign staff.”
After being told this, the Obama campaign announced yesterday that it had decided it was “inappropriate” to make the visit as part of a campaign trip.
It’s unclear how Obama could have made the visit at all, given the Pentagon’s directives. No Senate staff was on the trip, and the Obama camp says they received the Pentagon’s directives on Wednesday, after they were already abroad.