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Germans sober up from 2008

Whitewing

Well-known member
Too bad the American voters weren't so sober when they entered the voting booths.

The last time President Obama paid a visit here, as a candidate in 2008, he was cheered on by 200,000 Germans eager to see the back of George W. Bush and, as one member of that crowd recalled Tuesday, “full of wholly unrealistic expectations of what kind of miracles Obama could work.”

When he arrived here on Tuesday evening ahead of a full day of talks — capped by a speech at the Brandenburg Gate — the reception was far more restrained.

Almost five years later, Germans have undergone “a brutal sobering up” with regard to Mr. Obama, said Ralf Fücks, who heads the board of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a nonprofit political organization in Berlin. It is, he said, as overdone as the euphoria of 2008, but also a bit alarming.

Mr. Fücks and other Germans say there are several reasons for the change in attitude. The most commonly cited: the president’s inability to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, continued killings by American drones and, most recently, the disclosure of an extensive program for surveillance of foreigners.

Experts also point to the limitations on the power of an American president and on a country like Germany, which is the dominant European power but whose 20th-century history makes it awkward for it to take a leadership role or guide the Continent out of its economic doldrums.

“The American president would like to remind the Germans of the crisis, and what the consequences are if we keep sitting on our hands,” said Henning Riecke of the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Fücks noted the “permanent state of crisis” in the world economy and politics since Mr. Obama took office in January 2009. When there is “constant pressure to act,” he said, it is harder for a president — or, for that matter, his host, Chancellor Angela Merkel — to shape events and lay down guidelines for sweeping action.

On a broiling Wednesday, Berlin was unusually calm, with tourists and residents alike seeking welcome shade and apparently heeding the authorities’ pleas to avoid the center of town, heavily cordoned off in advance of the Brandenburg Gate speech. Offering a classic welcome from this history-scarred city to an American leader, the daily Berliner Morgenpost carried a front-page photo of the president, his wife and his daughters descending from Air Force One on Tuesday night below the English language headline “Welcome to Berlin, first family!”

Bild, the country’s biggest circulation newspaper, used the visit to make a political point, saying that Mr. Obama should use the occasion to make a public appeal to Berlin’s mayor — who will open the Brandenburg Gate event — to finally finish Berlin’s third airport, which has been mired in dispute, delay and cost overruns. And the daily Die Tageszeitung ran a headline in English with a photo of the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, saying, “Mr. Obama, Open This Gate” in a reference to Ronald Reagan’s challenge in 1987 to the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.

Daniel Hamilton, director of the Center for trans-Atlantic Relations at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, said Americans and Europeans tended these days to roll their eyes at each other and lament the paralysis of the other side. Dr. Hamilton, who has spent the past seven weeks in Europe, echoed other commentators in noting that the agreement to open talks on a far-reaching trade deal — one that would create a huge market operating on the same rules — represents the best way for Americans and Europeans to put their closeness on a new footing.

To judge from interviews with Berliners, though, there is little interest in or understanding of the complex trade talks, which are just starting. Rather, the data surveillance scandal has fired the popular imagination here, guaranteeing that Ms. Merkel, up for re-election in September, will raise the matter with Mr. Obama.

It is not as if Internet users outside the United States did not know that their digital movements might be watched, said Patrick Conley, 47, a media historian who lives in Berlin. “But you know it more exactly now,” he said. “In foreign policy terms, it is a catastrophe.”

That is particularly so in Germany, where state snooping was a dominant feature of the Nazi and Communist regimes. News that Facebook, which attracted 51 percent of German Internet users last year, according to the industry group Bitkom, had given up data to Washington’s surveillance program was a special shock here.

Mr. Conley was in the crowd for Mr. Obama in 2008. While he remembers the jubilation close to the speaker’s podium at the Victory Column, security forced him and his friends to sit in the surrounding park, far from the candidate, whom they watched on video screens.

The speech might have been electrifying close up, Mr. Conley said, but people near him drifted away before it finished. “We noticed that it was written not so much for Germans as for voters back home in Ohio,” he said.

Nonetheless, he and the same friends discussed going to hear Mr. Obama again on Wednesday, and were disappointed to discover that this time it was an invitation-only affair for about 5,000 people. “That is a shame,” Mr. Conley said.

Walther Stützle, a former editor of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, recalled the June day 50 years ago when tens of thousands thronged the Schöneberg district of West Berlin to hear President John F. Kennedy speak. There “was no security madness like today,” he said.

Onlookers, who idolized the young president, moved freely, Mr. Stützle said. And, he stressed, it was not just the Schöneberg speech — in which Mr. Kennedy memorably uttered, “Ich bin ein Berliner” — that impressed people. His second speech at the Free University of Berlin persuaded Berliners that he was a shrewd judge of what the Soviets were willing to risk in the city where communism and capitalism directly confronted each other.

That cold war context makes a comparison between the Kennedy and Obama visits impossible, Mr. Stützle said. “The threat of war today is in the Middle East,” he noted, “not in Berlin.”

After The King's speech, Mr. Fücks had a chance to meet with the Annointed One.

"Interesting name", said The King. "It's what I'm doing to America".
 

Mike

Well-known member
National Journal- President Obama's honeymoon with the world is over.
What was it, exactly, about Obama's controversy-marred trip to Germany and the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland that fell so flat? Ummm, how about … everything?
There were the snarky words from Vladimir Putin, who expressed an almost Soviet-esque distance from Washington in his views about Syria. "Of course our opinions do not coincide," the Russian leader said bluntly. There was the coded warning from Chancellor Angela Merkel about spying on friends, and her and Obama's continuing frostiness over the issue of economic stimulus versus austerity. Above all, there was Obama's vague attempt at the Brandenburg Gate to capture some wisp of his past glory by pledging vague plans to cut nuclear arms and an even vaguer concept of "peace with justice."
The "peace with justice" line was a quote from John F. Kennedy, Obama's attempt to steal just a little of JFK's thunder from 50 years before. He didn't come away with much, winning just a smattering of applause from a crowd that was one one-hundredth the size of JFK's. A crowd that, at about 4,500, was also much, much smaller than Obama drew as a candidate in 2008.
Not only is the honeymoon long over, folks. The marriage is becoming deeply troubled and, increasingly, loveless.
On June 26, 1963, you may recall from your history books, Kennedy flew to West Berlin, which was isolated behind the Iron Curtain, and declared "Ich bin ein Berliner" to delirious roars from a crowd of 450,000 Germans who immediately understood that he was telling them that "all free men, wherever they may live," stood behind them.
Some linguists later quibbled that Kennedy should have said "Ich bin Berliner," and that by adding the "ein" he was really saying, "I'm a jelly doughnut," since "Berliner" was the name of a pastry in some parts of Germany. In truth, the Germans didn't misunderstand JFK for a moment, and his speech instantly became one of the most famous and inspiring in modern history.
In contrast to JFK, and Ronald Reagan's almost-as-famous line 24 years later -- "Mr, Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" -- Obama came across as more of a jelly doughnut, a little soft and perhaps too sweet inside, especially compared to the hard-edged Putin. After their meeting, it was clear that Putin, right or wrong, was pursuing a set course on Syria and other issues, frankly backing the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while Obama was continuing to temporize over how much and what kind of aid he would give to the Syrian rebels.
"We cannot dictate the pace of change in places like the Arab world, but we must reject the excuse that we can do nothing to support it," the president declared in his Brandenburg Gate speech. It wasn't much of an applause line. Even after announcing that his "red line" had been crossed in Syria, Obama rejected air strikes and then told Charlie Rose that aid will be delivered "in a careful, calibrated way" because "it is very easy to slip slide your way into deeper and deeper commitments."
Compare that to Putin's active military support of Assad, which has helped the Syrian dictator regain the advantage against the rebels, and Putin's harsher words. After his meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron, in opposition to arming the rebels, Putin declared: "You will not deny that one does not really need to support the people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras. Are these the people you want to support? Is it them who you want to supply with weapons? Then this probably has little relation to humanitarian values that have been preached in Europe for hundreds of years."
And even as he quoted Kennedy in his Brandenburg Gate speech Obama appeared to hop lightly from topic to topic, much as his foreign policy has. "The Russians know what they want. I think we've in a situation of strategic drift for several years," says John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School.
Indeed, as I have previously written, to a degree that the administration has not really acknowledged, Russia under Putin has become the chief countervailing force to U.S. power and influence around the world, even more so than China, which often follows Moscow's lead in the U.N. Security Council.
So now, instead of the Americans, it's the Russians who are delivering up the challenging quotes, and drawing the hard lines, in Europe. History may well still be on Obama's side, as he suggested by touting Berlin's "lesson of the ages" in his speech. The audiences, perhaps not so much.
 

Mike

Well-known member
Whitewing said:
Yup, the world now sees him for the complete empty suit sham that he is.

If only we'd warned them. :roll:
Appears as though many have come to the conclusion that they made a mistake and I commend them for it.

After all, it takes much more of a credible person to admit a mistake than it does for one to obfuscate and continue to defend the ignorant assumption of "Hope & Change" in the future.
 

Whitewing

Well-known member
Mike said:
Whitewing said:
Yup, the world now sees him for the complete empty suit sham that he is.

If only we'd warned them. :roll:
Appears as though many have come to the conclusion that they made a mistake and I commend them for it.

After all, it takes much more of a credible person to admit a mistake than it does for one to obfuscate and continue to defend the ignorant assumption of "Hope & Change" in the future.

You wouldn't use such crazy talk if you were rural enough.
 

Steve

Well-known member
A crowd that, at about 4,500, was also much, much smaller than Obama drew as a candidate in 2008.

they had more people at a obscure midweek TEA Party protest in DC..

'Audit the IRS' Rally Draws Twice As Many People as Obama's Berlin Speech

Yesterday's 'Audit the IRS' rally held in Washington, DC, drew an estimated 10,000 people -

so I guess for those who claim the TEA party is over.. it looks like Obama's party is twice as over.. :shock:
 

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
"Barack Obama’s message on Wednesday was pure mush, another clichéd “citizens of the world” polemic with little substance. This was a speech big on platitudes and hopeless idealism, while containing much that was counter-productive for the world’s superpower. Ultimately it was little more than a laundry list of Obama’s favourite liberal pet causes, including cutting nuclear weapons, warning about climate change, putting an end to all wars, shutting Guantanamo, ending global poverty, and backing the European Project. It was a combination of staggering naiveté, the appeasement of America’s enemies and strategic adversaries, and the championing of more big government solutions."

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100222637/barack-obama-bombs-in-berlin-a-weak-underwhelming-address-from-a-floundering-president/
 
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