The WaPo on Landstuhl

More on the controversy over why Obama called off his visit to greet wounded troops at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Dan Balz and Michael D. Shear report in the Washington Post:

[Obama campaign official Robert] Gibbs said yesterday that the campaign had planned to inform the traveling media members sometime on the morning of the flight to Ramstein that Obama was intending to visit the hospital but had made no plans to take reporters, including even the small, protective press pool that now accompanies him most places.

But that's not what Gibbs told reporters on Friday:

Q: We would have stayed on the plane, would there have been any pool report?

Gibbs: there may have been, I don't know if we ever came to a decision on that.

Balz and Shear also report Gibbs's initial excuse that the visit was "canceled because Obama decided it would be inappropriate to go there as part of a trip paid for by his campaign." They fail to note that Obama visited troops during a campaign-funded trip to Colorodo on July 2. Clearly Obama didn't think that was "inappropriate", and no one criticized him for the visit.

"It does now seem that Barack Obama snubbed the troops for reasons other than a lack of photo-op potential, but the initial reports were less clear," writes Michael Goldfarb at The McCain Report. But he explains:

In this haze of confusion, and with the press unable or unwilling to resolve the question of why Senator Obama had snubbed the troops, this campaign drew its own conclusion from the crystal clear statements of Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell:

"We made it clear to him that campaign staff and press would not be permitted to accompany him," Morrell said of Obama. "We relayed those ground rules. They made a choice based upon the information we relayed to them. It was their choice. We had nothing to do with it."

It was their choice--meaning Obama didn't want to do the trip without his press, without his campaign staff, or both. Only when Obama was forced to explain the snub himself did we learn that it was the exclusion of Gration that led him to cancel the trip.

So Obama chose to cancel a visit with wounded troops because a campaign adviser, retired Major General Jonathan S. Gration, couldn't accompany him. That's arguably not as appalling as scrapping the visit because the photographers and press couldn't come along. But since when is a senator unable to meet and greet some wounded soldiers without an adviser to whisper in his ear?