More on the controversy over why Obama called off his visit to greet wounded troops at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Dan Balz and Michael D. Shear report in the Washington Post:
But that’s not what Gibbs told reporters on Friday:
Balz and Shear also report Gibbs’s initial excuse that the visit was “canceled because Obama decided it would be inappropriate to go there as part of a trip paid for by his campaign.” They fail to note that Obama visited troops during a campaign-funded trip to Colorodo on July 2. Clearly Obama didn’t think that was “inappropriate”, and no one criticized him for the visit. “It does now seem that Barack Obama snubbed the troops for reasons other than a lack of photo-op potential, but the initial reports were less clear,” writes Michael Goldfarb at The McCain Report. But he explains:
“We made it clear to him that campaign staff and press would not be permitted to accompany him,” Morrell said of Obama. “We relayed those ground rules. They made a choice based upon the information we relayed to them. It was their choice. We had nothing to do with it.”
It was their choice–meaning Obama didn’t want to do the trip without his press, without his campaign staff, or both. Only when Obama was forced to explain the snub himself did we learn that it was the exclusion of Gration that led him to cancel the trip.
So Obama chose to cancel a visit with wounded troops because a campaign adviser, retired Major General Jonathan S. Gration, couldn’t accompany him. That’s arguably not as appalling as scrapping the visit because the photographers and press couldn’t come along. But since when is a senator unable to meet and greet some wounded soldiers without an adviser to whisper in his ear?