When you are president, you can make a vacation look like a state visit. A stop here and a stop there, a speech here and a speech there, and - voila! - we have a state visit instead of a vacation. In order to know that this is a vacation rather than a state visit, we just need to ask a couple of questions: what is Obama in Africa for? What interest of America's or Africa's does this visit serve? He made a speech in Senegal about great strides which Africa has made - perhaps he has been reading the numbers of the GDP which economists have been publishing - and another one in South Africa about Nelson Mandela. In both places, the highlights have come from the sites he visited than from the speeches he made. Perhaps he would say something substantive in Tanzania so as to make this whole thing more a vacation. Perhaps I spoke too soon; I would love to be proved wrong.
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