Needlenose

Matt Yglesias snarked this morning:

John McCain’s big criticism of Barack Obama was that he didn’t take enough foreign trips… Now the critique is that too many Germans are interested in hearing him talk since, I guess, all else being equal we’d rather have a president foreigners find repugnant.

By complaining about Obama being popular with foreigners, McCain is pandering to the most insular, xenophobic instincts of the GOP base — showing that he’s more worried about them than trying to appeal to the common-sense center.

Then again, the prospect of a president whose foreign policy, for the first time in eight years, isn’t based on pandering to that fringe probably is exactly why Obama is so popular overseas.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Tags: Germany, Obama, xenophobia

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 2:33 pm and is filed under 2008 US presidential election. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.