Milbank's Follies

Last week Dana Milbank thought it very unprecedented for Barack Obama to leave New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza off the campaign plane during his trip to Europe, even though it wasn't.

I wonder when he's going to get around to noticing that McCain has thrown his whole campaign off the bus.

KANSAS CITY-- While the traveling press corps was shipped off to a barbecue restaurant here, John McCain charmed his way through an interview with a local TV reporter. Surae Chinn of KCTV posed such less-than-penetrating questions as "How important is Missouri?" and "Have you chosen a running mate?" and -- addressing the candidate's wife Cindy -- "How do you make your marriage work?" [...]

It wasn't part of the mix last week. National correspondents traveling with the candidate did not get to ask McCain a question for four days, and grew angry when a short media availability was scheduled for late afternoon Friday in Panama City, Fla. -- too late to do them much good and requiring extra flights for those who had planned to head home for the weekend.

While the front of McCain's plane was reconfigured with a couch and two captain's chairs to allow for easy conversation, journalists say he has invited them up only once, on a trip to Colombia. On the ground, his availability is sometimes limited to a quick gaggle with a small group of pool reporters.

Even the local reporter started annoying him, if you read the story. Wonder if this will be part of some rich tableau penned by La Milbank.

The last one was invented from whole cloth in its own right:

I've spent a few days on the campaign trail with Obama and know people who've traveled with him for months. I wouldn't argue that portrayals of the candidate as occasionally aloof, or a little professorial, are imagined.

But it's a long ways from, in the words of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, acting like "the presumptuous nominee" whose "biggest challenger may not be Republican John McCain but rather his own hubris."

Milbank, who is often wickedly revealing, last week seemed mostly wicked as he turned benign campaign tableau -- an Obama motorcade, a talk with the Treasury secretary, a "pep rally" with congressional Democrats -- into evidence that Obama thinks he's already the winner.

He really looks silly on this, doesn't he?