When Obama hits foreign shores, some of the billions of people who wish they could vote in the November US elections will come as close as they can get to getting their wish.
The McCain team, after goading Obama on to go overseas must now be kicking theirselves to high heaven.
They finally figured out that when Obama goes to Europe, he will be greeted by tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who wish they could be voting for him-- as a gesture repudiating Bush and his policies.
The images of those huge masses of people will be very powerful, showing independent voters what they'll be able to look forward to-- a president the world will love, a president they will be able to proud to have representing them.
If Obama's team is as smart as they have demonstrated themselves to be in the past, they will stop down in England, France, Germany, giving advance notice where he goes so the crowds can form. Yes, there will be security risks. Thats' part of the work nations have to do when very important people visit them. In each of those countries, it is very likely that tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands will gather to greet him. The participation in those crowds is the best shot the natives of those countries will have to cast a vote, or at least help Obama.
There will be risks. If significant groups of Muslims show up at the rallies, clad in burkas or other mideastern attire, you can be sure that Fox News and the McCain team will find them and use them as evidence that Obama is a Muslim supported by terrorists. The best way that Muslims can support Obama is to go to the Obama rallies dressed in western clothing or to stay home.
Israel will be an interesting case. Will right wingers demonstrate against Obama? Will the Bush-friendly Israeli leadership prevent large crowds from gathering to show support for Obama? Isreal is probably his riskiest stop. Will settlers from the west bank join together to protest Obama, giving him a blackeye with American Jews?
Iraq could be another trap. There's no way to see what's really going on there. The army runs the show and tell. I'm sure, that while Obama will meet with the Bush appointed military leaders, he'll also meet with leaders and people he sources on his own, who don't sell the Bush-McCain Surge-Pollyana line that all is wonderful. The smart thing to do is to finesse McCain, but going to the power players that McCain never went to because he just followed Bush's and Cheney's footprints. If he shows more creativity and connectivity in his Iraq, Iran and Afghan connections, he could come out way ahead.
Of course, even if he does, McCain's people will spin anything he does as weak, incompetent, friendly to the enemy and evidence of inexperience. That's the best they hav-- nasty spin.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
