BERLIN -- On what used to be the East German side of the Brandenburg Gate, Linnea and Julia, two American college students, have been spending this sunny Wednesday afternoon handing out blue postcards advertising Barack Obama's appearance tomorrow at the Siegessaule, the Uberphallic Victory statue in the Tiergarten, less than a mile down the boulevard Unter den Linden on the other side of the Tor.
Yesterday and today volunteers from Americans Abroad for Obama, as well as college students like Linnea and Julia, have been plying Berliners and tourists with these rather bizarre cards -- the artwork reminiscent of both German Expressionism and Soviet Constructivism in its depiction of a frowning Barack. Is the Obama brow wrinkled in thought? Is the Senator squinting at the future? Or is he hectoring an audience? Take your pick. Certainly, one customer, a Communist who used to live in East Berlin, likes the card. He asks for a stack to replace the usual Communist literature he puts in the mailboxes of his new neighbors in West Berlin.
People are arriving from all over Europe to hear Obama speak. Earlier today, Linnea and Julia met a group of Americans, just flown in from Paris, who pulled their suitcases along behind them as they worked their Obama shift. Dirk Mirow, the organizer of the Obama event for Americans Abroad supporters, has received emails from young people coming in from Macedonia and Poland. One of the (many) complaints that have been made about the venue for Obama's speech is that the traffic ring around the Siegessaule is so large that it will take 100,000 people to fill it. At this point, however, Berlin is girding itself for up to a million spectators. Tomorrow the five major roads leading to the monument will be closed.
Although several of the Berlin TV stations are carrying Obama's speech live, one as part of a two-hour special on the Senator, the city is beginning to have second thoughts about Obama's decision to make Berlin the site of the only public speech on his whirlwind European tour. The security cost to the city is closing on $500,000. Some Germans, moreover, are preparing to not like what Obama has to say. Niels Annen, a foreign policy expert for the Social Democrats (the Liberals, as opposed to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats), has told Der Spiegel (suddenly the "go-to" media on what's happening with Obama's Excellent Adventure, as Howard Kurtz quips) that Obama should not urge Germany to send more troops to Afghanistan. Yet from everything we hear about the speech, Obama will be urging greater participation from the Europeans in our historic trans-Atlantic alliance. This is the nice way of saying, "you have a responsibility to help us in our excellent adventures abroad."
The political cartoon in today's Berliner Morgenpost shows an Obama poster labeled WELT-TOURNEE curling tattered and torn in a rock-strewn moonscape below an assortment of spy satellite gewgaws. Young Europeans, if not newspaper editors, want to like what they see and hear tomorrow. From a distance, Obama is filling a void in moral leadership here. (Remember that many of these same students went to Rome for the funeral of Pope John Paul II.) Therefore, the hoopla in Berlin shows that it's disingenuous to say that presidential candidate Obama is not campaigning abroad -- but campaigning for what exactly among the Obamavolk and the rest of the Europeans remains to be seen.
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Put CNN Live on. Big party in Berlin.
Can't wait to see the speech! Hope it is broadcast on TV!!
Nevermind... I fell over the information accidently...1:30 PM Live from Berlin on NBCSM
Does anyone know if it will be televised here...and if so, where and at what time...????
11:30 A MDT. MSNBC will carry
it will be on MSNBC today at 1:00pm, i will be glued to the TV.
Depends. Where is 'here'?
'Televised' with an 's'.... British Commonwealth?
Well, if he doesn't win the election, at least he looks good in the press. Honestly folks, he's fresh. But I hope he's not co-opted or compromised. That he's his own man.
So far, much to the chagrin of ultra leftists, he has been. FISA is a good example. He COULD have just taken the pansy way and voted against it, because he knew it would pass. He didn't though. He voted HIS mind, and in his mind the compromise had more good than bad. I know it's hard for a lot of people to understand but this is just old fashioned sausage making legislating.
If you want a saint, go to church.
I have family and friends in Germany who have been quite upset to see this once respected nation
go down the tubes under George Bush.
They still find it difficult to understand how he was voted into office TWICE.
It will take time to regain their trust in our political system.
At least Senator Obama seems to be leading us back on course
IF... the "Diebold Election System" doesn't " deliver " another blow to
to the voice of the people.
OBAMA JUST STAY ON MESSAGE.... DO NOT GET SIDE TRACKED BY ALL THE MCCAIN B.S. AND RIGHT-WING ATTACKS...
THE COUNTRY AND PLANET HEARS YOU.... "A BETTER TOMORROW!!!!"
Righ on!
Anyone read this article in Newsweek? http://www.newsweek.com/id/147678/page/1
There's some things in there that are quite interesting. On the other hand, maybe we shouldn't tell Mr. Bush or Mr. McCain that "Opinion polls also show that most Israelis support direct talks with Hamas." It might make them feel a bit, well, out of touch with 'the situation on the ground'.
SENATOR OBAMA WE ARE SO PROUD OF YOU. BE SAFE ON YOUR TRAVELS AND HURRY HOME WE ARE SO PROUD OF YOU.
Godspeed Obama.
Hear! Hear! so true!
I was watching Democracy Now the other day, they had one of his advisors on. The last question Amy asked was "What is most important for people to understand Obama?
He answered, "First, he is a constitutional specialist, so we would have in the White House someone who knows the Constitution and the law, inside and out, in a way that we really haven"t, I don"t believe, since the founding period. That"s gotten much too little attention. The second thing I"d say about Senator Obama, the person I know, is he is a person of great calm"reminds me a little bit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, actually.
Bill and Hill both taught law at Arkansas. I think Obama's statements about abortion and FISA belie that he is not a constitutional law scholar.
He is not FDR or JFK. Why do people insist on these silly comparisons? Why?
Of course his advisors are going to say ridiculous claims like this because it makes them seem more important.
Have some perspective, please. It is becoming a cult of personality.
Obama taught law at the University of Chicago, which, I believe, is a better school than any in Arkansas. As for his statements about abortion, he has been consistently pro-choice, so Ii am not sure as to what you are saying. As for Roosevelt, check out Korematsu v. US, the decision in which the Supreme Court upheld Roosevelt's imprisonment of those of Japanese descent during World War II. Roosevelt, like most other Presidents, cared nothing about the Constitution when he wanted to do something.
Sorry, your candidate LOST. DEAL WITH IT.
It may be a far stretch to say JFK but FDR is not too much of a reach.
Crappy Economy, War time, charasmatic leader. Now all we need is to put everyone to work rebuilding our country.
Read FDR's first presidential speach, not too much has changed really.
You can ridicule the "silly" excitement some of us feel about him as a "cult of personality," but, really, you're fighting a losing battle. Critics' main argument against him is that he's inexperienced, but this argument is repeatedly undercut by the facts on the ground.
He knows his stuff, he's a brilliant strategist, he is inspiring and mobilizing, he has a compelling vision, and he manages to hold onto his humanity while traversing the minefield that is American politics. Quite a feat. So it's perfectly conceivable to realistically imagine him "the next" FDR. Or JFK. Or Reagan (albeit with a different agenda).
Sure, disagree. But it's not "silly."
Here's one perspective:
anything besides another Bush/McCain era (both voting the same 95% of the time)....
Is there someone else you'd like to propose?
The bit about Obama filling a "void in moral leadership" seems to come out of nowhere to me. Perhaps this is in reference to eastern Europe where there have been excesses of capitalism and organized crime? As far as the rest of western Europe goes, I cannot imagine people looking to the United States for moral examples. Obama's reputation as an orator precedes him, to be sure. Germans love to hear good political speeches.
Europeans (the distinction between western and eastern is archaic), as well as Americans, feel a "void of moral leadership" that their present leaders cannot fill. Unfortunately for the Europeans, a leader has now emerged who has the capacity to fill that void, but he is an American - Barack Obama. So, they are left to savoring that "moral leadership" vicariously.
The Europeans are not "looking to the United States for moral examples." They are looking to Obama.
breaking news:
cnni is running "Black in America", a documentary.
sky news is running a rich guys trial.
bbc world is doing ethiopia (starvation).
france 24 and presstv (iran) are ignoring Obama.
BUT Germany's NTV are covering it.....bless 'em.
I've been handing out those postcards the last few days and the interesting thing about Berlin is that 99% of the people who have expressed no interest and/or opposition to him are farther to the left (or "more liberal" in American political lingo) than he is. They were against the Afghanistan war; they're against the death penalty; they want a single-payer healthcare system for the U.S. - none of which any successful candidate offered this election year. Once you got them talking they'd say he's at least the best choice of all the candidates this year. Most people on the street, however, were excited he's speaking and asked for ten or twenty of those "Expressionist" postcards.
It's going to be big today.
You have a better bead on this than Mayhill Fowler. Street politics is still fun in Europe.
It is a possibility that 1 million people will come to see him t here. That would be an astounding number.
In Portland, OR, he had 75,000 to 80,000 people to come see him. And, in Denver, he will have 75,000 to 80,000 to see him make his nominating speech. But 1 million people? Even 500,000 people would be earth-shattering. Personally, I hope 1 million shows up. That would be the most awesome headline of the year so far.
GO Obama!!!!!
GO AWAY Obama!!!!
He DID go away, to find out that our troops in the field and our allies love him just as much as we do.
Deal with it PUMA.
Yea, I know you want him to go away but it ain't happening!
i think the american people are just plain thrilled to have someone representing them (to the rest of the world) who is not an inarticulate moron, more concerned with the pig roast and massaging angela merkel's neck than he is with global affairs ...
The rest of what you said is pretty correct, but man, it's hard to resist a good pig roasting. Oh, pork...
Bush has alienated the USA from the rest of the world. Bush has ruined the corporate identity of Ame
Posted July 23, 2008 | 05:42 PM (EST)