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Besides being featured in NBC News' primetime documentary, the President's main task for the day was preparing for his diplomatic tour of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, a trip whose "tent pole," as anchor Brian Williams put it, would be a speech to the people of the Arab World--and Moslems in general--in Cairo. This is the oddly phrased question that Williams' posed to Barack Obama in his Exclusive sitdown. "It has been said it is a speech that your predecessor perhaps could not have given constitutionally given who he is." Obama seemed appropriately mystified about whether Williams was referring to George Bush's psychic constitution or to the Constitution of the United States. He ventured an answer anyway: "I would not suggest that somehow I am uniquely positioned to deliver this speech."

CBS prepositioned Lara Logan in Cairo, "the intellectual center of the Arab World," in anticipation of Obama's arrival. She noted that even though only 20% of the world's Moslems are Arabs, the Arab World strategically is Islam's "most critical" region for the United States, and Egypt in turn is critical to the region's stability with "the Suez Canal at its northern tip where 30% of the world's oil passes." She warned that Obama's appearance in Cairo may be interpreted as an endorsement for the oppressive 28-year regime of President Hosni Mubarak that has consigned 40% of Egypt's population to a life of poverty.

In Washington, ABC's Martha Raddatz did not see Egypt as the focus of the President's effort: "He has to address the Israeli-Palestinian situation," she insisted, quoting Obama's comment in a National Public Radio interview that "the current trajectory in the region is profoundly negative." She reminded us that Obama had demanded that Israel halt construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian territory and that Israel had refused to do so. "This is the big problem," Raddatz argued.


Andrew Tyndall 6/4/09 7:31:18 pm

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