Powerful as the image was, back home some voters wondered whether the trip was necessary. Both Obama and McCain had been invited Thursday to a cancer forum organized by cyclist Lance Armstrong's foundation at Ohio State University.
McCain showed; Obama did not. Some in the crowd took notice.
Ann Marie Jones, a stay-at-home mother whose 10-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer in September, said she had leaned toward Obama "until he didn't show up tonight."
"I feel like I understand what he's doing over there, but I think he needed to be here tonight for this," she said.
Jones, a 40-year-old Republican from Aledo, Texas, said she was troubled by the duration and scale of Obama's overseas trip. "I think we have a lot of things going on with our children -- many different things going on here in the United States that need our attention."
Many voters still seem to be puzzling over who Obama is, even after a race that has lasted a year and a half. By 58% to 47%, voters identify more with the values and background of McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, than with Obama, according to a newly released Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
Obama may also be slipping in some key states. He lost a narrow lead in Colorado, falling 5 percentage points in the past month, and now trails McCain 46% to 44%, a new Quinnipiac University poll found. In Minnesota, Obama fell 8 percentage points, though he still leads McCain 46% to 44%, the survey found. The polling spanned the five days before Obama went abroad and the first four days of his trip.
At a time when nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track, the political climate would suggest that McCain, whose party controls the White House, might lag by large margins. Yet a national Fox News poll released Thursday showed that Obama's 4-point lead over McCain in June had shrunk to a single point. The new Journal/NBC poll showed Obama leading by 6 points, unchanged from the month before.
The race remains close even though McCain has stumbled at times and has been largely eclipsed this week by Obama's high-profile trip to Europe and the Middle East, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Thursday, television images showed Obama addressing the throng in Berlin, his speech carried live on cable news networks. McCain, meanwhile, spoke to reporters outside an Ohio fudge shop, where his comments were nearly drowned out by wind chimes.
