Pat Dollard

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Times Online:

Barack Obama denied yesterday that he was ignoring the concerns of ordinary Americans while he tours the world, amid signs that the adulation he is receiving abroad has alienated some US voters.

After the Democratic presidential candidate holds meetings with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron in London today, the last leg of his nine-day international tour, he returns home to a general election campaign with new polls showing him in a tightening race against John McCain, the Republican cand date.

Mr McCain and his surrogates have spent the week seeking to build the impression that Mr Obama’s trip – and particularly his speech to 200,000 in Berlin on Thursday – shows an arrogance and presumptuousness that is disconnected from voters back home, who are most concerned with the faltering US economy.

“I’d love to give a speech in Germany. But I’d much prefer to do it as president of the United States, rather than as a candidate for the office of presidency,” Mr McCain said in the battleground state of Ohio. An aide to the Arizona senator called Mr Obama’s speech “a premature victory lap in the heart of Berlin”

Mr McCain’s campaign has been beset by missteps and bad luck in the past month, and has been dwarfed in terms of media coverage by Mr Obama’s almost flawless audition on the world stage. Yet new surveys show Mr McCain pulling almost even with Mr Obama – a Gallup poll yesterday had Mr Obama leading 45 to 43 per cent – and the Democrat losing ground in several key battleground states.

He has lost a small lead in Colorado, and his ten-point advantage over Mr McCain has dropped to just two in Minnesota.

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Although Mr Obama is still favoured to win, other surveys show that many more voters identify with Mr McCain’s “values and background”, and feel they still don’t know Mr Obama. While Mr Obama met Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Wednesday, Mr McCain was holding a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

“For the past two days on talk radio here, pretty much every caller wanted to know why Barack Obama was in Europe and the Middle East rather than talking to people back home about the issues here,” said Andrew Seder, a reporter for the Times Leader in Wilkes Barre who covered the McCain event. Mr Obama defended the trip, saying that persuading foreign leaders to send more troops to Afghanistan could save the US billions of dollars.

At a Paris press conference with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, Mr Obama said: “Let me remind everyone. I’m not the president. I’m a US senator.” Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist, said that he believed the trip had been a success, because voters “saw someone acting presidential, and that is one of the biggest thresholds he has to cross.”