U.S. voters give Obama's overseas trip mixed reviews

By Andrea Hopkins

CINCINNATI (Reuters) - Ohio sales manager Lucas Seltzer isn't thrilled that Barack Obama is overseas talking to foreigners instead of at home speaking to Americans, but he understands the politics behind the Democratic presidential candidate's high-profile international trip.

"I would rather see Obama running around this country talking about his issues than in Iraq talking to prime ministers about foreign policy," said Seltzer, 33.

"But he's probably doing that to show he has foreign policy exposure since he's been criticized for not having any. And it's just a week, so I don't have a big problem with it."

With newspapers awash with photos of Obama addressing 200,000 cheering Germans in Berlin and wall-to-wall media coverage of his stops in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. voters offered a mix of support, anger, scepticism and shrugs.

Seltzer said he had not decided who he would vote for in November's presidential election, but he is leaning toward Republican John McCain.

Seltzer's girlfriend, Kristin Altieri, 26, favours Obama, a first-term Illinois senator and said she was glad he was overseas trying to repair relations damaged by eight years of failed diplomacy under Republican President George W. Bush.

"It's important to mend those broken ties," said Altieri, a student.

Other voters were scathing. "My first reaction when I heard about it ... yesterday was 'How dare you?'" said Marcus Laubli, a Swiss-American who works in a coffee shop in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"Obama tried to make it a Kennedy moment for himself and it was sacrilege for his party ... (trying) to recreate the situation but in a very calculating and naive way," said Laubli, a Republican.

Obama spoke not far from Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, where in 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy told a cheering crowd, "Ich bin ein Berliner" (I am a Berliner).

POLITICALLY STAGED

Public opinion polls show Obama's relative lack of experience in world affairs remains one of his biggest hurdles with voters in his battle with McCain, a four-term Arizona senator and former Vietnam prisoner of war.

Obama supporter Micah Cox, 32, said the first part of Obama's trip -- to Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel -- was valuable because it showed the 46-year-old senator could be an international leader, while the European leg has been more politically staged.

Cox, who lives about an hour outside of Chicago in Indiana, shrugged off Republican criticism of Obama's trip.

"They almost forced Obama to go over there and when he went they say he shouldn't be there," she said.