Obama may go to Iraq. This is the sort of “I’ll go if I can squeeze it in” answer that makes sense.
Yesterday, I was scratching my head over Obama’s strategy on handling McCan’s invitation to travel to Iraq together. His campaign could have finessed this issue a lot of different ways. They could have questioning whether the two major party presidential candidates traveling through a war zone together represented a unique and unnecessary security risk. They could have said it would be inappropriate to consider the invitation until the Democratic nomination was formally secured. They could have simply said their schedules were unlikely to coincide.
Most notably, the campaign could have said that the candidate hopes to get to Iraq before Election Day, but that it would depend on many scheduling factors.
Instead, their initial answer asserted that there was no value to traveling to Iraq, which I think is a much tougher “sell.”
Similarly, I wonder how the campaign would be different if, when a reporter asked, “You don’t have the American flag pin on. Is that a fashion statement?”, Obama had simply replied, “yes, I left it on the lapel of yesterday’s suit, hanging in my closet right now” instead of explaining at length that the lack of a lapel pin was a deliberate choice, to protest how the pin had become “a substitute for true patriotism.”