Gingrich: How to judge Obama overseas trip
One measure of the overseas trip will be the degree to which Obama is willing to acknowledge that what he has seen has changed his thinking.
In Gingrich’s formulation, no one as bright as Obama can spend 10 days overseas and not come away with insights he didn’t have when he started. “If he encounters realities different than he expected, is he willing to actually share that with the American people?” Gingrich wondered.
The second measure for Gingrich is any hint of how Obama would react upon discovering that what he has been talking about won’t work. From Pakistan to Iran to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Gingrich said, Obama may well discover that the ideas he enunciated during the campaign fall short. “The core principle is, ‘so what do you do if the world’s harder than you think it is?’” he said.