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Barack Obama appeared bemused by the Michael Jackson hoopla. "Like Elvis and Sinatra he was someone who captivated the imagination of the country," he told ABC's Jake Tapper, before turning sarcastic. "I assume at some point people will start focusing again on things like nuclear weapons."
Obama's visit to Moscow (10 min on Monday, 10 min on Tuesday) marked the first time in his short Presidency that a major overseas trip failed to dominated the news agenda. His summitry at London's G20 (54 min on April 1st and 2nd) and his speech to the world's Moslems in Cairo (28 min on June 4th) had no such problems. NBC's Savannah Guthrie noted that the President "barely drew a crowd" outside the Kremlin and Russian national television "barely mentioned the visit at all."
Even after Obama offered himself up for interviews to the networks' traveling White House correspondents he barely made a ripple. He described his two-hour meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that included a 50-minute monologue from his host on the deterioration of Russian-US relations since the end of the Cold War. "He is strong. He cares deeply about Russia. He has suspicions about the United States," was how Obama described Putin to NBC's Chuck Todd. "This is a very smart, very tough, very unsentimental person," he offered to CBS' Chip Reid. ABC's Tapper reported that Obama met Mikhail Gorbachev, the onetime General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and had this to say about Putin: "I thought it was important to listen."
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