Anchors Away, pt. 3: Obama vs. Obama

Barack Obama's interview with Brian Williams was bumped back into the last half of the NBC Nightly News last night... by Barack Obama. In a move the Obama campaign probably preferred—given that Williams again asked him the question of the week on whether he believed the surge in Iraq had worked—NBC gave the leadoff spot to Obama's dramatic speech in Berlin yesterday.

Before Williams' sitdown with Obama, NBC aired Kelly O'Donnell with McCain, offering him, as ABC and CBS did earlier in the week, essentially an opportunity to rebut and react to Obama in Europe. She also pressed him on his charge that Obama is willing to lose a war to win an election—though this was at least the second time this week that I saw a reporter ask McCain to defend an incomplete version of the accusation. Do you really believe he would be willing to lose the war?, O'Donnell asked McCain. What she should have asked was: Do you really believe he would be willing to lose the war to further his campaign?—which was McCain's full, and much more damning, charge.

The former simply accuses his opponent of being week; the full version accuses Obama of something more like treason. (Obama responded to McCain's charge to Williams, saying he found it "disappointing" that McCain would suggest he was not interested in keeping the U.S. safe.)

For all the particulars of this answer and that answer, though, the way this round of anchor interviews will help Obama—if it does at all—is in the visuals. Arguably the goal of his overseas trip was to nullify the question of whether he is ready to act on the world stage (in the same way that, simply by appearing on a debate stage with a President, a challenger suddenly looks more Presidential).

In other words, this week Obama was executing a simple trade with the evening news shows: gravitas for ratings. The networks will know with their weekly ratings whether they got what they wanted out of the bargain. He'll have to wait until November.