Barack Obama is on his field trip and the media are along for the ride. Take that any way you want.

If the real Messiah came back to the Holy Land, the coverage couldn’t be any more thorough, and it probably would be a good deal less adoring.

John McCain, meanwhile, can’t get an op-ed into the New York Times.

That’s the same paper that says the Very Junior Senator from Illinois is on a journey “to fortify his credibility as a wartime leader.”

Say what? You could make a case for “establish some,” but “fortify his” assumes he already has credibility as a “wartime leader.” Did Illinois go to war with someone and I missed it?

But you needn’t rely on the Times. You can check out the reports of approximately 4 billion other journalists on how wonderfully our lad is doing abroad. Here’s what I’ve gleaned:

He spent a day with Gen. David Petraeus, the architect of the troop surge that has brought Iraq to the brink of the Democrats’ worst nightmare – stability. Obama came away no less firmly convinced that the surge was all wrong. Not for military reasons, of course. Who cares about that stuff? It’s politics – U.S. politics, to be specific – that makes the world go around (and that makes Barack go around the world).

Which is how the Very Junior Senator could keep a straight face as he told ABC News that, even recognizing the success of the surge, if he had it to do over again he’d still oppose it, “because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one that I just disagreed with.”

Translation: Winning me the presidency was more important than winning in Iraq.

He also told ABC: “I am glad that in fact (the) political dynamic shifted at the same time that our troops did outstanding work.”

Well, how nice, coming from the guy who said the surge would not only fail to diminish the violence in Iraq, but would “do the reverse,” and who joined lustily in the chorus of congressional Democratic complaints that the surge was unaccompanied by political progress.

It takes a big man to admit that everyone else was wrong and just got lucky.

Most candidates could expect a rough ride for so blatantly trying to have it both ways. This one wins praise for his “agility and good fortune,” as the Washington Post put it.

The Post was referring to the policymaking part of Obama’s trip. Invoking a previously unknown constitutional clause that empowers the junior senator from Illinois to conduct negotiations with foreign heads of state, Obama very publicly agreed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on his outline for a U.S. troop withdrawal deadline – something the Bush administration has wisely declined to set.

Obama has long dangled a withdrawal timetable in front of anti-war voters, ranging from “immediate,” when he needed their primary votes, to this week’s 16 months. If you discount the ever-changing dates, you can take a headline on USA Today’s Web page at face value: “In Iraq, Obama sticks to guns on U.S. pullout.” Yep. He’s sticking to his guns like a bitter, religious Pennsylvanian.

Monday evening on CNN, former Clinton adviser David Gergen was taken aback: ” … we only have one president at a time. … I cannot remember a campaign (in) which a rival seeking the presidency has been in a position negotiating a war that’s under way with another party outside the country.”

But is this a case of arrogance or an honest mistake? Questioned by reporters about an assertion that what Obama says Thursday in Berlin should not be considered a campaign speech, a senior foreign policy adviser to the campaign replied, “When the president of the United States goes and gives a speech, it is not a political speech or a political rally.”

Maybe Illinois won the war and Obama won the election.

Kevin O’Brien is deputy editorial director for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. E-mail [email protected].