Barack Obama wants three things out of his tour of the Mideast and Europe. He wants people everywhere to think that he has the answers for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He wants U.S. Jews to believe that he is Israel's unquestioning supporter. And he wants Americans to notice that Europeans would vote for him by a five-to-one majority, if they could vote in U.S. elections.
Americans will notice that, although it will not do him much good among the key group of American voters whose support would make an Obama victory next November a dead certainty: the white poor in decaying rust-belt towns who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations," as he famously put it last spring. Those people are not impressed by the views of foreigners, and they don't automatically vote Democratic any more.
Neither do Jewish Americans, and the Zionist majority among them are deeply suspicious about Obama's commitment to Israel. This is true even though he now toes the line, saying that Israel is just the innocent victim of "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." All the history has vanished down the memory hole, and he no longer refers to the underlying issues of conquest and settlement.