The McCain campaign just released another statement taking issue with what they argue is the presumptuousness of Obama’s speech in Berlin today:
Recent polls have suggested the race might be tightening in battleground states, even as Obama dominates the national and global media during his sweep through the Iraq, the Middle East and Europe.
I asked Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, if McCain’s message–that Obama is taking a “premature victory lap”–might be contributing to that tightening.
His answer was that the polls are not, in fact, tightening.
“This is not a particularly close race,” he said. “[Obama] has a steady five-to-six-point margin.”
Sabato said that the polls actually remained “amazingly static,” and that Obama’s trip has “firmed up his support.”
“People want to get a sense of the candidate and he has to pass a certain threshold,” said Sabato. “This is a critical threshold that he has passed. He can do this.”
“This was such a risky move to do,” said Sabato, arguing that a misstep on the international stage would have drawn attention to Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. “But it has paid off big time for him.”
