The Washington Post is the latest to “fact-check” the Ramstein visit, finding that the McCain ad related to the trip is off:

The essence of McCain’s allegation is that Obama planned to take a media entourage, including television cameras, to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany during his week-long foreign trip, and that he canceled the visit when he learned he could not do so. “I know that, according to reports, that he wanted to bring media people and cameras and his campaign staffers,” McCain said Monday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” The Obama campaign has denied that was the reason he called off the visit. In fact, there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser, whose status as a campaign staff member sparked last-minute concern among Pentagon officials that the visit would be an improper political event.

Actually, that’s not true. The original plan was to take the entire Obama entourage to Ramstein and keep the press on the plane, a plan they were less than happy with:

Q: Did it not occur to anybody that this might be viewed as a political stop?
Gibbs: We had taken some of that into consideration, but we believed that it could be done in a way that would not create, it would not be created or seen as a campaign stop.
Q: The schedule was for this plane, with us in it, to fly to Ramstein. By the way we were expected to pay for the flight, what were you suppose to do with the entourage then?
Gibbs: You would have stayed on the plane.
Q: We would have stayed on the plane, would there have been any pool report?
Gibbs: there may have been, I don’t know if we ever came to a decision on that.

So, we have it from Obama’s mouthpiece that they had been taking all of the political calculus into consideration for some time. The idea that the Pentagon somehow sandbagged them is just ludicrous. But notice the line above, “by the way we were expected to pay for the flight?”

As seen from the huge bills the press corps has been getting for the trip, you can see how they’d be mad at the thought of going to Ramstein, hanging out in the plane, and then not getting a story.

Gibbs also admits that they were, at the very least, discussing having a pool reporter with them. That’s different than what happened in Iraq and Kuwait when the photos were provided by the military. Or, maybe the reporter asking the question did mean a pool report from the military. Either way, there was a discussion on having some sort of media coverage of the trip to the hospital which makes the statement by the Post, “there is no evidence that he planned to take anyone to the American hospital other than a military adviser,” wrong.

If I had to guess, the press on the plane would have refused to pay for the Ramstein leg of the journey. That makes me wonder how much of the decision to cancel the trip was financial, since the Obama team would not be able to defray the cost with the press expense accounts, as well as reimbursing his campaign for the costs of the flight which was, in effect, Senate business.