It’s only natural that Barack Obama’s speech today in Berlin is being judged in the context of the election campaign. All the television pundits are pondering deeply over whether it was wise for a candidate to give a foreign policy speech to hundreds of thousands of people who don’t vote, whether Obama looked presidential enough, and most importantly – whether this helped him in his battle with John McCain.

It struck me that all the talk about Obama-McCain and the racehorse judgments being offered about both of them completely missed the mark. If this speech was a contrast between two politicians, it was not between Obama and John McCain, it was between Obama and George W. Bush.

( Related thread: The dark side of the reaction on Obamamania ~ Editors )

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Can you imagine more than 100,000 people assembling for a speech by George W. Bush? Even after 9/11 there was something about “you’re either with us or against us” that set teeth jarring all around the world, however sympathetic people were to America in a time of great national trauma.

Can you imagine George W. Bush saying any of the following?

1. “All nations – including my own – will [need to] reduce the carbon we send into the atmosphere.”

2. “[We must say] ‘never again’ in Darfur.”

3. “Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law?”

4. “Cars are melting the ice caps in the Arctic.”

5. “[We must deal with] poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union.”

Here on the left blogosphere there is a lot of disillusionment with Obama. The FISA vote was a disappointment for many, and some of Obama’s bellicose statements regarding Afghanistan have people wondering whether he will be too quick to reach for military solutions. All this tacking to the center has his earliest and strongest supporters entertaining doubts about Obama.

There will be plenty of threads in the coming months to express these fears and to ask whether Barack Obama is all fancy progressive talk hiding a conservative in reality. For a moment, though, let’s talk about George W. Bush. I was particularly struck by comment 5. in the list above. Within about a week or two of moving into the Oval Office, Bush cancelled a program arranged under Clinton with Russia’s Boris Yeltsin to have both nations monitor and track all nuclear warheads and spent plutonium of the former Soviet Union. The program was working. The cancellation got a little squiggle of press and then disappeared, and I never did hear afterwards what the Bush administration found objectionable about the program. I suppose it was part of “anything Clinton did” had to be bad and needed to be reversed.

Eight years have gone by and that is a very long time for nuclear material to find its way into the wrong hands. One of the people working to prevent this was Valerie Plame, and we know what happened to her. Obviously this was an administration that talked one way but acted completely differently (“We do not torture!).

What 100,000 people in Berlin seemed to be looking for today was someone who was the opposite of George W. Bush. Obama’s “rock star” appeal may be part of what brought those people out, but we all need to step back a bit and remind ourselves that the desire to put an end to George W. Bush, his administration, his policies, and the destruction and reckless regard for humanity that he represents, is possibly the strongest reason why Barack Obama has come as far as he has.