Did President Barack Obama step on his own healthcare message last night?

Morning TV shows led with his comments about  black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates who was arrested after trying to get into his own home.

Obama said police acted “stupidly,” a comment likely to lose him some friends in law enforcement, and that the incident was a reminder the race issue “still haunts us.”

It was a brand new comment from the president on a hot-button issue: race relations in America.

So how could the healthcare comments, which dominated the nearly hour-long news conference, compete? They ended up playing second fiddle because it was the same pitch heard over and over recently.

Next week will be crunchtime to see if Congress will give the new president a feather for his cap by voting on healthcare legislation before the August recess.

No foreign policy questions at the news conference. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Tbilisi, Georgia, was not overlooked by Russia which is doing some saber-rattling over it today.

Closer to home, Obama keeps pressing on healthcare today with a trip to Cleveland. His popularity has taken a bit of a drubbing in Ohio, so watch for the reception.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama gestures at news conference)

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush may be deeply unpopular at home and reviled abroad but in some places people, apparently, are sorry to see him go.

The BBC reports  that Dubya has approval ratings of around 80 percent in Africa where his administration increased aid funding and raised the alarm over the Darfur crisis. In fact, children born in the Sudanese region are routinely named George Bush, the BBC reports. And in Kosovo a main street was named after him to thank him for supporting Kosovo’s independence.

Israelis will miss Bush too. Bush has been a staunch supporter of Israel and some analysts believe Israel’s current offensive in Gaza was timed to coincide with the final days of his administration because the Jewish state knew it could count on his support. ”Israel is probably the only place on earth where Bush can still get a standing ovation,” Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution told the BBC.

Colombia, India, Ukraine and Georgia are also sorry to say good-bye to 43 for various political, economic and trade reasons. President-elect Barack Obama takes office next week and has been embraced abroad as the man who can repair America’s soured relations with the world.

But leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may come to miss the man they loved to hate when they have to start dealing with his successor, the man that the world loves to love, the BBC says.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Bush awards Presidential Medal of Freedom to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe on Tuesday)

WASHINGTON - U.S. President-elect Barack Obama and his defeated Republican rival, John McCain, are engaged in somewhat of a rematch. The two are trying to help their respective parties win a razor-close U.S. Senate race in Georgia. 

McCain has accepted an invitation to attend a rally in Atlanta on Thursday for Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, while Obama aides are being dispatched to the state to provide a hand to Democratic challenger Jim Martin, a former state senator.

A Dec. 2 runoff is being held because neither Chambliss nor Martin obtained the majority required under state law in the Nov. 4 election to be declared the winner.

A Democratic aide said no final word has been given on whether Obama will visit Georgia on behalf of Martin. A Republican aide said there’s a chance former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin may show up for Chambliss.

While Obama won the White House, McCain took Georgia.

Georgia is one of three states where tight U.S. Senate races have yet to be decided.

The two others are in Minnesota, where Republican incumbent Norm Coleman is trying to fend off a challenge by Democrat Al Franken, and Alaska where Republican incumbent Ted Stevens, convicted last month of political corruption, is clinging to a narrow lead over Democrat Mark Begich.

Democrats gained six seats in Tuesday’s election to increase their majority in the 100-member chamber to 57.

If they win the three remaining races they would reach for the first time in three decades the 60 needed to pass legislation over Republican hurdles.

Both political parties along with political analysts say they don’t expect Democrats to run the table and pocket 60.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Tami Chappell (Sen. John McCain grabs arm of Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss during campaign rally last February in Georgia)

LYNCHBURG, Virginia - Democrat Barack Obama scolded Russia again on Wednesday for invading another country’s sovereign territory while adding a new twist: the United States, he said, should set a better example on that front, too.

The Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq war, which his comment clearly referenced, is well known. But this was the first time the Democratic presidential candidate has made a comparison between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s recent military activity in Georgia.

“We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.”

Foreign policy has become a dividing line in the race for the White House.

Obama favors a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq over 16 months, while John McCain, his Republican rival for president, opposes a timeline and says U.S. forces must stay to finish and win the war.

McCain, an Arizona senator, sought to highlight his foreign policy credentials during the Russia-Georgia crisis last week, giving a series of harsh statements directed at Moscow soon after the conflict began.

Obama, who was on vacation in Hawaii, followed suit with statements that became sharper over time.

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WASHINGTON - What does it mean to be Georgian? To President Mikheil Saakashvili, who is looking toward the United States for help in his battle with Russia, it is more than just words.“Yesterday I heard Sen. (John) McCain say we are all Georgians. Well very nice … but of course it’s time to pass from words to deeds,” Saakashvili said in an interview with CNN.

The Republican presidential candidate in a strongly worded statement against Russia’s military operations in Georgia on Tuesday said the United States and its allies “must stand united” in trying to persuade Russia to withdraw its troops from Georgia.

McCain told reporters after he spoke by telephone with Saakashvili that the Georgian president knew that the “brave little nation” had the thoughts and prayers of Americans.

“I know I speak for every American when I say today we are all Georgians,” McCain said.

It is unclear what McCain meant by those words or what sort of deeds Saakashvili is expecting.

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TEANECK, N.J. - Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Lieberman slammed Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday over the Russian invasion of Georgia and said that the Democrat still wasn’t experienced enough for the White House.
“We’ve got a real clear choice to make. And I say it respectfully to Sen. Obama because he’s a gifted young man. But he’s not ready to be president on Jan. 20th of 2009,” Lieberman, of Connecticut, told a fund raising event for Republican hopeful John McCain.

“As the Russians move into Georgia as aggressors, and if you read the statements from the beginning, from Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama, one had a kind of moral neutrality to it that comes I think from inexperience.

“The other’s — Sen. McCain’s — was strong and clear and principled and put America where America always want to be, on the side of freedom,” he said while introducing McCain.

Lieberman sits in Congress as an Independent after he lost the Connecticut Democratic primary election in 2006 but won actual re-election running as a third party candidate.

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Lieberman applauds McCain)