The mainstream media are slobbering all over Barack Obama’s overseas dog and pony show, with a barrage of uncritical coverage and shameless partisan promotion. He’s in Afghanistan now, to pretend that he’s learning something about the war there: Barack Obama lands in Afghanistan on first leg of world tour.

Obama’s trip – also taking in Iraq, the Middle East and Europe before ending at Downing Street next Saturday – has attracted enormous media attention, to the irritation of his Republican rival John McCain, whose foreign trips go largely unnoticed by the US media.

It is unusual for a candidate to spend time overseas in election year. US commentators this week have repeatedly used the phrase “high-stakes” to describe his trip saying he is running a risk taking time out from campaigning on domestic concerns - primarily job losses, collapsing house prices and rising fuel costs.

“If Obama says he represents a new politics, he’s certainly smashing an old paradigm by going,” the presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, of Rice University in Texas, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “And for 10 days, he’ll own the media. It’s gigantic for him.”