Last night at the Bronx Democratic County Dinner, I ran into Ezra Friedlander, an Orthodox Jew who lives in Brooklyn and does political PR. He said he thought Barack Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East was good, but that John McCain “has a clearer understanding of the history and the players.”
Friedlander goes on to say he’s "leaning towards" voting for McCain.
The trip did win over a once-skeptical Assemblyman Rory Lancman of Queens, who had offered his unsolicited advice to Obama before the trip.
This afternoon, Lancman put out a rather supportive statement, saying in part:
“For those of us whose familiarity with Senator Obama comes almost entirely from his twenty months as a presidential candidate, this closely scrutinized trip to the Middle East has been an opportunity to see him not as a mere candidate but as a potential president in a president’s most important and challenging role – as commander in chief and leader of the free world. Senator Obama’s performance was reassuring, and at times characteristically inspiring.”