Senator McCain can’t seem to catch a break during Senator Obama’s widely watched trip abroad this week. The Arizona senator’s campaign had planned for the Republican candidate to make a dramatic push for offshore oil drilling while standing on a rig off the coast of Louisiana today, but weather associated with Hurricane Dolly forced the campaign to cancel, Politico reported. Mr. McCain will instead head to Ohio and attend a summit on cancer with Lance Armstrong. The detour also forced Mr. McCain to scrap a meeting with Louisiana’s Governor Jindal, who has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential pick.

OBAMA DROPS $5M ON OLYMPICS

Senator Obama’s campaign is purchasing $5 million of advertising on NBC to air during the Olympics, a trade publication, AdAge, reported. Some of the ads will air on the broadcast network, while others may be carried by NBC/Universal-owned cable networks, such as CNBC, MSNBC, and Telemundo. Mr. Obama’s buy is the only substantial network television ad purchase by a presidential campaign in recent years, AdAge said. It was not clear whether the purchase would have Mr. Obama announced as a “brought-to-you-by” sponsor of NBC Olympic coverage.

MCCAIN ISSUES ‘J.V. SQUAD’ CREDENTIALS TO PRESS

The McCain campaign had some fun with its traveling press corps yesterday, ribbing reporters who were covering the Republican in Pennsylvania instead of Senator Obama’s foreign trip. The campaign issued press credentials that read: “JV Squad/Left Behind to Report in America.” On one side the credentials featured the Statue of Liberty against a backdrop of the American flag, while on the other was a picture of a man drinking French wine and an image of the Eiffel Tower. The text was translated into French on that side of the card. The McCain campaign has been grumbling of late over what it has described as fawning press coverage of Mr. Obama. The Illinois senator has drawn nearly nonstop coverage this week during his visit to the Middle East and Europe as he seeks to burnish his foreign policy credentials.

COLUMNIST CITED BY POLICE AFTER HITTING PEDESTRIAN

The conservative columnist Robert Novak was cited by police yesterday after hitting a pedestrian with his black Corvette in downtown Washington, D.C. Mr. Novak, 77, told reporters he did not know he had hit someone. He continued driving but was stopped by a bicyclist who chased him down and stopped in front of his car. “I feel terrible,” Mr. Novak told reporters, according to Politico. The victim, 66, was not identified but was taken to the hospital with minor injuries, authorities said. “He’s not dead. That’s the main thing,” Mr. Novak said. He was cited for failing to yield the right-of-way, he said.

GROUP: TAX PLANS WOULD ADD TRILLIONS TO DEBT

The competing tax plans laid out by senators Obama and McCain would add trillions of dollars to the national debt and could add to the tax system’s complexity, a nonpartisan tax research group concluded in a report released yesterday.

Mr. Obama’s plan would increase the national debt by an estimated $3.4 trillion during the next decade, the center reported. Under a similar analysis, Mr. McCain’s tax proposals — largely a continuation of the Bush tax reductions — would add $5 trillion. The current national deficit is $9.5 trillion.