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The dark side of the reaction on ObamamaniaBy Hannes Artens
The great day has come. The rapture of Obamamania has hit Europe with a force as if John Lennon reincarnated and the Beatles had reunited. The coverage in the run up to Barack Obama's historic speech in Berlin and the attention the event itself received can only be compared to a yet to be staged once-in-a-hundred-years rock concert. Both German public TV stations, ARD and ZDF, broadcasted it life - even the plays of the German soccer team at the World Cup are only aired alternately - 200,000+ enthralled fans packed the Strasse des 17. Juni between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column, where the speech was held, and the German press lost all journalistic soberness in its ardor. Der Spiegel's lead story is representative for much of the coverage:
( Related thread: Barack plays the Tiergarten ~ Editors ) It was a crowning final to a perfectly timed and staged world trip favored by fortune - from his basketball feat in Kuwait, to Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki de facto endorsing his withdrawal plan, to George Bush choosing this very week to enter into the dialogue with Iran Obama had always called for - and in many ways a historic precedent. Never before an American presidential candidate had staged such a rally abroad - one got the impression that if the Presidential Seal on the speaker's desk weren't missing, you'd watch 44's first trip abroad in February '09 - no living politician had drawn such a large crowd in Europe - well, Tony Blair did, but in protest against him - never before Europe favored one US presidential candidate so clearly over the other - if Germans were allowed to vote on November 4, Obama, according to a new Gallup poll, would get 62% and McCain 10%, in France it's even 64% vs. 4%. Everybody - except for John McCain, of course, who wept bitterly in face of his "base," the media, withdrawing its affection - could be happy, we all got what we bargained for. Barack Obama buffed up his foreign policy credentials, the Obama campaign got pictures of cheering crowds in the hundreds of thousands they can juxtapose with great pleasure with McCain's half-full town halls or the irate demonstrations that accompany every of George Bush's appearances abroad. Europeans were not only able to hang on the lips of and shake hands with "the other America," "the anti-George Bush" - one commentator on ARD went so far as to call Obama a savior and redeemer - but also were given a glimpse of the hope-mania that has cast a spell over America for the last six months - whether Obama will be able to live up to this Freedom Tower-sized expectations is another story; his FISA vote leaves plenty of room for worries of things to come. Josef Joffe sums it up nicely in The New Republic:
And yet, while I'm fully aware of this distortion of reality in European perception of their redeemer, Barack Obama's whistle-stop in Germany leaves me with another stale aftertaste. One that is more concerned with American perceptions than European. What deeply disturbs me, is how very down a significant part of American voters is on how Obama is received abroad. Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson analyzes:
I can certainly understand - and have written about it in relation to Iran uncounted times - what we call a "rally around the flag effect" in political science, the populace backing an even hated leadership when the nation or people are under attack or just criticism from abroad. I can also understand that just one year after the beef over Iraq Sen. John Kerry being called "too French" came down to a kiss of death. What's completely beyond my understanding is how a candidate enjoying a positive image abroad - I'm not talking of such dubious do-gooder institutions as the UN but of allied nations like Germany and Great Britain - can turn into a handicap. What's the matter with Kansas? What happened to the Republicans watching in raptures the crowds cheering Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech? Don't Americans want their politicians to be popular, their country to be admired abroad again? Does Joe Klein's characterization of McCain that he "would place a higher priority on finding new enemies than on cultivating new friends" apply to more Americans than I ever thought possible? Do they relish in their president being feared, do they favor being more isolated and being perceived a greater threat to world peace than Iran? Is, if 4,000+ dead in Iraq aren't, even George Bush himself admitting that his "dead or alive" swagger might have been over the top still not enough to discredit shooting-from-the-hip foreign policy? To be sure, we're not talking of the notorious Europe-is-from-Venus-America-from-Mars fringe of die-hard neocons here, but of such a significant number of independent voters that the Obama campaign itself worried about the turnout - of course not about nobody showing up, as the candidate joked, but about too many. Anne Applebaum on Slate disagrees and believes to have detected a positive sea change of attitude in the American electorate towards a more open-minded, internationalism-affirming world view, yet spick-and-span-new polls from the make-or-break swing states of Colorado, Minnesota and Michigan see John McCain making substantial gains in the very week of Obama's overseas trip. I hope Anne Applebaum is right, but if Margaret Carlson got a point that a majority of Americans - stalwart Republicans and a bulk of independents that is - are inherently anti-internationalist, jingoist beyond remedy, and favor a bellicose unilateralism, despite all that happened over the past seven years, a mere change at the top will not do it. If despite of all the atrocities we came to see for seven years a large crowd in an allied nation cheering an American politician talking of freedom has become an asset you can spin into the negative, America's problems go much deeper than George Bush, start becoming a matter of character, and should give us food for very serious thought. -- Hannes Artens July 25, 2008 - 8:48am
( categories: USA: Campaign 2008 )
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