It took 90 minutes -- forever in the realm of rapid response -- but the McCain campaign appears to have found the line in Barack Obama's Berlin speech that they can pounce upon.
"While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a 'citizen of the world,' John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide this election," spokesman Tucker Bounds wrote in an email that was blast emailed to reporters Thursday afternoon. As an attack, it's reminiscent of the Bush-Cheney 2004 strategy that seized on John Kerry's command of French and his talk of a "global test" in order to sow the seeds of doubt with voters regarding the Democrat's nationalist bona fides.
At the blog of the conservative Natoinal Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez isolated another international-sounding clause from Obama -- "People of Berlin. People of the World." -- in order to observe that "apparently this is a moment that Obama doesn't really need Americans for."
But can the charge of unacceptable foreign-ness work this year, too? Not according to the Democratic strategist who got beat by those tactics last time around. Bob Shrum, who was Kerry's campaign manager, says stoking fears of the Democrat as a mushy-headed globalist "barely worked in 2004, when Bush was over 50 percent with his approval rating, the economy was getting better, and the public was not decisively against the Iraq war. Defaulting to that kind of strategy, it seems to me, has almost no prospect of being successful -- at a time when people can't pay their kids' college tuition."
Of course, Shrum has been wrong about this once before. But there's some evidence that political junkies, at least, are tiring of this line of attack. A guest post at Marc Ambinder's Atlantic blog today that predicted the GOP could have a "field day" with these remarks prompted a "flood of angry emails," according to a follow-up item. "What's so bad about Germans cheering an American, especially when the visuals were stunning," Ambinder wrote. Give Tucker Bounds some more time, and he can probably come up with an answer to that.