Today the Obama campaign held a briefing for reporters traveling on Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. In a conference room at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman, senior advisors spoke on background for a little less than an hour, discussing Obama’s motives and itinerary while abroad.

The presumptive Democratic nominee and Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE), who accompanied Obama on a Congressional Delegation trip to Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq, are scheduled to arrive in Jordan by V22 aircraft at 2:30pm, local time. After getting briefed and resting up, the senators will hold a 45-minute media avail on their CODEL at the historic Amman Citadel.

While he isn’t exactly a stranger to magazine covers, television news, and newspapers, go ahead and call it Obama week in the U.S. press. There are 40 journalists whose news outlets are paying thousands of dollars to cover Obama’s first foreign trip as candidate for president - and he will sit down with anchors from the five television networks who will make the overseas journey to conduct the interviews in person.

The purpose of this trip isn’t political, Obama’s advisors say, but the candidate stands to gain from the expected constant press coverage, which will come by way of numerous photo-ops with world leaders, press conferences, and one rally-like event in Berlin, where some tens of thousands are expected.

But the campaign denies the Germany event is a big political rally. One advisor explained, “It will not be a speech about campaign issues, he’s not going to address campaign issues in terms of other candidates, it is not a speech about American politics, and so it’s not a campaign event. We’re not trying to recruit support from the crowds that are coming.”

Rather, “The point of the outdoor rally is that the Senator wants to speak directly to our allies and to the people of Europe and the people of the world and it would be inconsistent to do that and try to limit the attendance for that event. There’s a great deal of interest in his visit. We want to accommodate that interest.”

The campaign told reporters today that Obama will not hold any fundraisers while he is abroad - despite the fact that the Democrat is wildly popular in Europe.

Read Obama’s itinerary after the jump.

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The Obama campaign held a conference today call to discuss the senator’s upcoming trip to the Middle East and Europe. According to the foreign press, Obama will arrive in Jordan early next week, but until now the campaign has refused to discuss any details of the trip on the record.

Several of Obama’s top foreign policy advisors were on today’s call to talk about the purpose of the trip and with whom the Illinois senator would meet on his trip to Jordan, Israel, Germany, France, and the UK. Included on that list: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Opposition Leader David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, King Abdullah of Jordan, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Chimon Perez, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

But the campaign continues to refuse to discuss the dates and locations of any of the planned stops, presumably for safety concerns, and will not say where the meeting with the Palestinian Authority leaders will take place.

According to advisor Susan Rice, Obama will exchange views with these leaders on issues critical to national and global security in order to deepen relationships and explore concretely a way to discuss cooperation on these challenges.

Rice added that “it’s important to note that it is not our intent to make policy or to negotiate, we won’t do so. There’s one President of the United States at any given time and we will certainly honor and respect that.” But, she said, the candidate may “underscore” the message to leaders that “stepped up U.S. contribution should be met with a stepped up NATO contribution to the extent possible” in Afghanistan.

The campaign is not calling this a campaign event - even though the candidate will be joined by at least 19 media outlets along the way. “The trip is not at all a campaign trip, a rally of any sort. It’s …a series of substantive meetings with our friends and our allies to talk about the common challenges that we face and the national security dangers for the 21st century,” Robert Gibbs said on the call.

In fact the only speech-like event the campaign will discuss is the much talked about Berlin event, where the candidate will “underscore our shared values and our shared goals” to the German people.

The German press originally reported the Democrat would speak at Brandenburg Gate, which then was quickly made off limits by the German government. Today the Obama campaign would not confirm or deny the latest speculations on where the speech may take place, only that they were looking for a location that “meets our needs and our German hosts’ needs and interests.”

The campaign declined to say how long this trip has been in the making, but said Senator Obama reached out to Secretary Rice about his trip and that the two had “a very productive conversation.” The campaign has been relying on help from US embassies in each of the countries they are planning to visit.

When rumors swirled that Barack Obama would speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, during his European trip next week, it was reported that someone in the Bush Administration approached a German official at the G8 Summit in Japan to question the appropriateness of the location of the Democrat’s remarks.

The German press soon reported that German Chancellor Andrea Merkel deemed the location, one of the last remaining points connecting East and West Germany, off limits for an Obama stop – not because of Bush’s concerns, but as a matter of fairness. If Obama spoke there, then any candidate running for any office, in any country around the world may want to speak there.

Today the candidate told reporters aboard his campaign plane that his campaign has been “trying to coordinate with folks on the ground in terms of finding an appropriate site, but we didn’t have a particular site in mind.”

Obama said getting his message out is more important than the location of the speech. “Our goal is just for me to lay out how I think about the next administration’s role and rebuilding our transatlantic alliance and so I don’t want to the negative to be a distraction. What I want to do is just work with folks on the ground to find some place that’s appropriate,” Obama said.

Earlier this week at a town hall in Virginia, Obama gave a sneak preview of that message. “Although our military power is unmatched, the real challenges, the real threats, that face not just our security but world security today can’t be solved just by one country because they span the globe…We’ve got to worry about and spend time thinking about building alliances and restoring relationships with countries all around the world in order to deal with our national security,” he said, prefacing that he didn’t want to “spill” too much about the top secret trip.

The campaign has not made announcements on the specifics of Obama’s visit to Germany.