200,000 cheer on Obama, but will it help him?
Germans still like the Fascist “unity” message: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer”, as they used to say in the 1930s
Barack Obama took his presidential road trip to Berlin today for a bold set-piece evoking the ghosts of past presidents – but again leaving himself open to accusations that he is all style and no substance. Senator Obama gave a speech in front of a staggering crowd of 200,000 people in front of Berlin’s Victory Monument, near where the Berlin Wall once stood. Decades ago, president John F. Kennedy stood nearby and proclaimed “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” – but today was more a chance for Europeans to say “Ich Bin Ein Obama”.
(“I am not Bush”)
In what is being billed as an “unprecedented” overseas campaign speech, Senator Obama also referenced Republican president Ronald Reagan in another attempt to show the bipartisan politics he says his campaign is all about. But Senator Obama’s Republican rivals say his campaign is really all about putting on a spectacle at the expense of concrete ideas for the future – and reports on the speech suggest it will heavy on rhetoric and light on detail.
Senator Obama told the crowd that Americans and Europeans must tear down walls between estranged allies, races and faiths, in a soaring challenge to a new political generation. He warned that humanity must build “a world that stands as one”. “The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another,”he said. “The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand,” he said, referring to festering divisions between Europe and the United States opened up by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand,” said Senator Obama, in an address beamed live on US and German television channels and to viewers around the world. “The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down,” Senator Obama said, drawing cheers and applause. This echoed former president Reagan’s call to then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Berlin in 1987 to “tear down this wall,” before the fall of communism.
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Posted by John Ray. For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. For a daily survey of Australian politics, see AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Also, don’t forget your roundup of Obama news and commentary at OBAMA WATCH
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Posted by JonJayRay on July 25, 2008 9:57 am
» Filed Under Elections, Iraq, Multiculturalism/PC, News, Politics As Usual, Socialism
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