A half century ago, a speechwriter named Emmet Hughes presented an idea to his boss, Dwight Eisenhower, who was then running for President of the United States.

With the unpopular Korean War dragging on, Hughes suggested that Eisenhower promise to go to Korea.  That promise was delivered in a speech late in October. And the immediate consensus was that Eisenhower had thus locked up the election.

What neither Hughes nor Eisenhower knew at the time was that the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, had come up with the same idea -- and had rejected it because, running against the top military figure of the day, he would simply have dramatized the difference between the candidates.

I wonder if, in that distant event, there isn’t an already ignored message for Barak Obama.  Running against a candidate with superior military credentials, he’s visiting Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Apparently his purpose is to learn more about a situation on which he has already expressed his many different and conflicting opinions.

He may pull this one out. But I think he would have been wiser to follow Stevenson’s example and then to concentrate, instead, on the economy.