WHILE Barack Obama was wowing the crowds in Berlin, his Republican opponent was at Schmidt’s Restaurant and Sausage Haus in Columbus, Ohio, trying to live up to its slogan about making “the best of the Wurst”.

Trying to get a little love and attention seemed a stubbornly hopeless task for John McCain, the Vietnam war hero who, only a few months ago, had been politely welcomed in the same capitals as Obama, but without the mania.

Most media commentators regarded his tour of the diners and supermarkets of Middle America as pitiful. “I’m not making that up. Senator ‘National Security’ went from the cheese aisle to the fudge house and ordered a box of cream puffs,” television presenter Keith Olbermann scoffed.

The voters did not seem to mind in the least, however. “We love him,” said Diane Woods, from Columbus. “I don’t know why Obama is getting all this attention. McCain is right where he should be - in America.”

Some aspects of McCain’s tour did appear comical at the time. The 71-year-old husband of a multi-millionaire heiress was in a grocery store in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, bemoaning the high price of milk while Obama was discussing the future of the Middle East with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Or he was running radio ads in tiny hamlets called Berlin blasting Obama’s foreign policy, while the Democrat was smiling and patting Chancellor Angela Merkel on the shoulder in the genuine German capital.

It was cornball politics but, it transpired, none the worse for that. McCain’s picture made the front pages of newspapers in the heartlands of America while Obama’s aides wondered nervously whether it was really desirable to attract a 200,000 crowd in Berlin when his biggest rally in America had drawn only 70,000 - and that was in Oregon, the home of hippies and latte drinkers.

Initially, the polls showed McCain gaining on Obama. By the end of the week there was a “baby bounce” for the Democrat. On Friday Gallup and Rasmussen’s tracking polls showed that he had opened up a 5-6 point national lead over the Arizona senator.

Will that last? Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader, still rues the moment when, high in the polls, he punched the air triumphantly at the party’s 1992 Sheffield rally and shouted: “We’re all right.” To this day he believes that his premature victory lap cost him the election. Could Obama look back on his heady overseas tour with similar regret?

Lanny Davis, a former White House official under Bill Clinton, believes Obama must make the economy his priority from now on. “‘The economy, stupid’ is more relevant than ever. When he returns, he should not utter one more word on foreign policy and confront John McCain on what he intends to do about the semi-depression we are in.”

The gulf between fashionable East and West Coast opinion and the views of residents of the “flyover states” of Middle America rarely seemed more pronounced than last week. Obama’s tour seemed to be going so well, as far as the liberal commentariat was concerned.

Eugene Robinson, a columnist in The Washington Post, gushed about the “extraordinary luck that has followed Obama’s new Boeing 757 around the globe like an escort plane”. Others looked at the Obama ’08/President stitched on to the back of the pilot’s chair on his O-Force One campaign jet and shuddered at his presumption.

When Obama cancelled a proposed visit to injured US servicemen at Landstuhl, in Germany, after the Pentagon reminded him that he could come as a senator but not as a political campaigner, yet found time to go to the gym in the Berlin Ritz-Carlton, the Republicans’ picture of him as a phoney-baloney speechifier was complete “If you want to remember one thing about this trip it is that Barack Obama chose to work out rather than see the wounded troops because he couldn’t bring [television anchors] Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams with him,” said Sean Hannity, a conservative talk show host.

Band of courage

On Obama’s wrist was a tribute to Ryan Jopek, (below) a 20-year-old US sergeant killed in Iraq in 2006. It reads: “All gave some. He gave all.” It came from the soldier’s mother.

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