Obama's schedule

Barack Obama's camp has released information on the foreign leaders the presumptive Democratic nominee will be meeting with; meanwhile, John McCain may have created a security risk for Obama.

Published July 18, 2008 9:12PM (EDT)

Barack Obama's campaign has released some details of his overseas trip, including a list of foreign leaders with whom he plans to meet. What they hadn't wanted public, though, were certain details about the schedule of the trip; it's common to keep such things embargoed from public release for security reasons, especially when traveling to a war zone. But one person hasn't respected that embargo -- Obama's rival for the presidency, John McCain.

Reuters made the catch, noting that in public remarks McCain made at a fund-raising luncheon on Friday, he divulged the likely timing of Obama's stop in Iraq. As Politico's Ben Smith observed, "Ironically, McCain and the GOP have been demanding for months that Obama go to Iraq; his comment may have made the trip more complicated."

Obama is tentatively scheduled to meet with a wide range of leaders while he's out of the U.S. According to NBC's First Read blog, that list includes British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, as well as the country's opposition leader, David Cameron; Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, and its foreign minister; French President Nicolas Sarkozy; Jordan's King Abdullah; Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and a number of Israelis, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, President Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, once the country's prime minister and now its opposition leader.


By Alex Koppelman

Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon.

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2008 Elections Barack Obama John Mccain R-ariz.