When Hillary Clinton kicked off her 2000 campaign for senate, she gaudily commenced a "listening tour" in which she traveled New York listening to the concerns of ordinary voters. The cynics among us never wholly swallowed the notion that the then-First Lady really cared what the Joe Six-packs of the Empire State were thinking, but the display of modesty was becoming. It played in Poughkeepsie.
Barack Obama last week gave his answer to the listening tour - the first-of-its-kind "Talking Tour." In spite of going to areas where he had little or no expertise, Obama showed scant regard for what he might have heard on his global travels. When David Petraeus spoke about the needs of the Iraqi theatre, Obama haughtily dismissed Petraeus' concerns as beneath his potential pay-grade. Of course, the Talking Tour culminated in grand fashion - the foreign policy neophyte addressed hundreds of thousands of Germans, rendering a sloppy history of the Berlin Airlift and the Cold War in the process. If Obama's journey was supposed to be a listening tour, then that was a curious and ill-fitting showpiece.
Then again, does Barack Obama really do listening? Remember, to Obama, a national dialogue on race was in actuality him giving a single speech.
In America, we don't actually expect our presidential aspirants to be humble individuals. Individuals marked by unusual quantities of humility don't seek to rule 300 million people. But we do expect our politicians to know their limits. And we do expect them to keep some shackles on their egos. Most presidential candidates understand this and work very hard to at least appear somewhat humble.
Barack Obama obviously has deemed such efforts beneath him. In so doing, he has made a critical error. A Gallup poll out this morning suggests that his Talking Tour will damage him with the voters. Quoth Gallup, "Could John McCain benefit from Barack Obama's much-publicized foreign trip? Several observations from the just-completed USA Today/Gallup poll suggest that this is a possibility."
Only 35% of voters had a positive impression of Obama's trip. 26% had a negative impression, while 39% had no opinion. Mind you, these numbers come after a week of saturation media coverage that wrapped the Talking Tour in glory. As we get further away from that coverage and the impression of an unjustly haughty neophyte solidifies, the narrative of the Obama campaign will be rewritten.
The Rasmussen tracking poll also suggests that the long term impact of the Talking Tour will harm Obama. An initial bump from the trip that swelled Obama's lead to eight points at the end of last week has vanished. Today, the lead has shrunk to one.
What's especially problematic for Obama is there's no obvious way for him to undo the damage of his Talking Tour. If he suddenly decides that he should value David Petraeus' opinion rather than publicly minimize it, his insincerity will be transparent. And it's impossible for him to unring the bell of talking 40 minutes of One World gibberish to a bunch of swooning Germans.
In Democratic circles, there has long been the concern that Barack Obama's ego would ultimately make a mess of his campaign. While the mainstream media was swooning, it happened last week. Other politicians would have made their first trip to the war zone in three years humbly vowing to learn all they could. Obama instead used his public pronouncements abroad to confirm his own brilliance and sense of self-importance. That he may have done, but he redefined himself for the worse in the process.
