Sunday, July 27, 2008

Landstuhl Has Legs

John McCain is running an ad that goes after Barack for not visiting injured American troops in Germany.
During his trip to Germany, Obama was scheduled to visit the American hospitals at Ramstein and Landstuhl, but cancelled the trips after being told by Pentagon officials that he could only visit in his official capacity as a senator, not as a candidate.

The cancellation of the visit is the sort of decision that threatens to undo the positive image presented to U.S. military personnel from the photo-ops of Barack with troops from Afghanistan last week. Why did it happen?
I was going to be accompanied by one of my advisors (Major General Jonathan Gration), a former military officer." Continued Obama, "And we got notice that he would be treated as a campaign person, and it would therefore be perceived as political because he had endorsed my candidacy but he wasn’t on the Senate staff. That triggered then a concern that maybe our visit was going to be perceived as political.

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