Barack Obama's Berlin Speech

Presidential candidate Barack Obama made a speech before Berlin's Victory Monument in Tiergaten Park before tens of thousands of enthusiastic Germans. This is further proof that Barack Obama is far more popular in Europe than in the United States.

By nearly three to one margins, Barack Obama is favored to be President of the United States in Germany, France, and Great Britain. Yet Barack Obama, despite a so far successful foreign trip, remains neck and neck with his opponent Senator John McCain. This phenomenon parallels previous elections in which John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000 proved to be more popular in Europe than George W. Bush, despite each having lost to George W. Bush in the United States.

Why the European fascination with Barack Obama? Part of it has to do with Obama's style. He's young, energetic, articulate, handsome. Many people say that Barack Obama reminds them of John F. Kennedy. Of course they admire the JFK style that Barack Obama has managed to copy. The substance is something else again.

Europeans are also more comfortable with American politicians who do not assert American power. Europeans are uncomfortable with the idea that their formerly great nations are overshadowed by the super power that lays across the Atlantic.

President Reagan was pretty much despised in Europe (except in Eastern Europe; the former Warsaw Pact countries know who is responsible for liberating them.) President George W. Bush is hated with a passion in Europe, Bush personifies everything the European finds unsettling in an American; brash, swaggering, and, above all, religious. Except for the growing number of Muslims in Europe, Europeans by and large are secular and fear people who are not.

It's true that John Kennedy asserted American power as well and asserted a special American mission in the world. But it is the style, not the substance of John Kennedy that is admired. Were John Kennedy to return from the dead, he would in quick order be ostracized from the Democratic Party, like Joe Lieberman.