In the wee hours of Wednesday morning President Obama returned from his first overseas trip as president.  To follow-up on my column from The Times last Thursday, I wanted to look at the trip from a communications perspective.  Did Team Obama have a solid message?  Were they able to effectively communicate that message and what positives or negatives remain from their time abroad?

First, from a policy perspective most analysts are grading the trip somewhere between a B- and C.  These folks claim that Obama went in to the G20 and NATO meetings with concrete goals and came up short on both accounts.  At the G20, the U.S. stimulus plan was panned in favor of more regulation on banks by both France and Germany, and at the 60^th anniversary NATO Summit, Obama’s call for more combat troops in Afghanistan was dealt a shift blow.  However, a pledge of 5,000 non-combat troops to train Afghan forces was offered.  So we take the good with the bad.

I won’t pass judgment on the policy wins or loses, just passing on what I’ve heard in TV commentary.

I bring this up only because it plays a role in how we view the overall communications strategy of the trip.  I think the Obama team would have preferred greater gains at the G20 and NATO so they could play those out and earn high marks both on policy and public relations.  Playing successes to the crowd back home would be a winning strategy no matter what.  For instance, they were quite adamant in passing on the story that Obama brokered a deal on tax havens and the selection of the new NATO secretary general and then ultimately dialed both back to just say he facilitated the meetings that took place, but did not broker the deals themselves.

The two – policy and communications – in this case go hand in hand.  Many of the Sunday shows panned the policy gains – or lack thereof – at the summits, while others have applauded the message discipline shown during the eight day trip.

Strictly from a communications perspective, I think they did well.  The overarching theme was that Obama was not Bush.  This was something that was put out there frequently during the trip, in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of Europeans and the Islamic world during Obama’s two stops in Turkey.  The main event of the trip was not any of the summits, but instead a campaign-like town hall meeting in Strausbourg, France, where Obama took questions from the crowd and apologized for the “arrogance” of America. 

Clips from this event were played over and over on television, and rivaled the sound bites he offered from any other event during the week-long trip.  His Prague speech on nuclear proliferation, ironically timed perfectly with the backdrop of news that North Korea had launched a potential weapon into space, could have been a big winner.  But it was a message we had heard before, and an issue in which a great deal of progress has already been made.

To hear the President specifically call out the previous Administration and claim that he would personally mend strained ties with our European allies was the hallmark message from the trip.  The ironic thing is, although the European people were not necessarily the biggest fans of George W. Bush, the leaders themselves were.  Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown, etc. all had very good relationships with President Bush.  They all invited him to their home countries and their homes.  He received many of them at either Camp David or the Crawford ranch.  So the theory that we are despised in Europe, as I have discussed in a previous column, is really off-base.  It serves a political purpose, so they beat the drum.

There were some mis-steps to be sure.  The first day, as first reported by Joe Curl of The Washington Times, included an ill-timed press conference that was in the middle of the night back home in the U.S.  There was also a ready-made late night talk show punch line when Obama offered the Queen an iPod complete with videos of his speeches.

Finally, the most talked about stop of the trip turned out to be the surprise part.  Just like President Bush before him, Obama flew to Iraq in darkness to greet troops and meet with Iraqi leadership.  Although the stop was a surprise to the rest of the world, much like during the Bush years, it was certainly not shocking.  Even when I was in London, before Obama touched down in the country himself, reporters were speculating about a possible surprise trip.  Although their focus was less on Iraq and more on a potential trip for the much discussed speech in a major Islamic capital within the first 100 days of the new administration.

Visiting Iraq was a smart move.  Since being sworn in, Obama has really neglected the issue.  Afghanistan has come to the forefront of political discussion, in addition now to Iran and North Korea, with Iraq receding to the background.  It has become almost an afterthought.  The main reason is the great successes we have had in that theatre since the surge took effect under General Petraeus. 

It was important to show the Iraqi people, and especially their elected leaders, that the American president was still concerned about their country and that we would not – pardon the use of phrase – leave them behind. 

From a communications perspective, it provided a solid bookend to an overseas trip.  A visit to Afghanistan is certainly in order soon, I would think, since Obama has called for more troops to be sent there.  Possibly a visit to some of the newly pledged 5,000 NATO non-combat forces would be a good bet?