Sen. Obama in Europe

I don't want to write about politics too often here (we'll see how long that lasts), but with Sen. Obama coming to Europe later this week, this gives me the perfect opportunity to disguise a post on politics as a post on Europe & America. Yes, the Europeans love Obama, but they know very little about him. The French will often ask me about the election and whom I am voting for -- even people I just met. They clearly love the idea of Obama, and in their questions for me, they seem to be searching for confirmation that he is what they hope he is, and that America is what they hope it is.

Sometimes I detect a certain surprise or even doubt that the US may actually be more progressive in one respect than Europe. "Is America ready?" they often ask; though what exactly we may be ready for is rarely specified, it is obvious enough. One asked if America was ready to elect a Muslim, which I guess proves that I am not the only person in Paris who reads The New Yorker.

I did get a good laugh over the "controversy" regarding whether the Senator would speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. I visited Berlin in 2001 when the Gate was undergoing a multi-year restoration project and it was literally wrapped inside a giant advertisement for T-Mobile. It was rather clever -- if you were on the west side you would look east at the Gate and see a picture of Moscow; on the east side you would look west at pictures of London and NYC; on both sides was a message about how T-Mobile had service worldwide. Now we are told that the Gate is too special a landmark for the Senator to speak in front of -- too bad, I guess it would be different if only he were selling cell phones.

As the focal point of the West's battle with and defeat of Communism, Berlin is the perfect place to give a speech celebrating the ties that bind the US and Europe and to talk about how the US and her allies must work together to defeat a common foe, so I assume that is what we will hear later this week. And since the pundits back home will be carefully listening for any indication that Obama is insufficiently "American", we can safely expect several lines in the speech demanding that Europe do its part. Europe will celebrate the speech and we will see in January if the changes people on both sides of the Atlantic want to see actually begin to take place.

So that's what I think he will say; for me the $64,000 question is: how large will the crowd be?