WHat next, David? Looking for his image in a tortilla? I think you're missing something extremely important here: he's running for US president.

That Germans superficially and naively like him is irrelevant to Americans who should be voting for their own reasons, not those who aren't governed by the office being filled. That the attending public and the press' presentation looks as more like groupthink than anything else seems to be registering with those highly sought-after swing voters in the US.

European adulation for Obama will make him the continent's poodle. To voters back home, he could come off as elitist, more European than American (though, shades of Incurious George, he's apparently spent just 24 hours in Western Europe over the past 10 years).

Today on BBC, it was summed up quite nicely. There was a brief snippet of sound thrown into a horribly disorganized piece flashing uncritically from one bit of Obama-idolitry to another, where a German state minister was quoted saying [Obama] "he represents civil rights to me", in a statement based solely on his image and the color of his skin, is 40 years late, and is utterly ignorant of the involvement of the democratic party in Illinois being more along the lines of Bull Conner, a democrat, than with Martin Luther King, a republican.

But that isn't simplistic enough for the garden variety european looking for a slick, well-managed, one-sided fairy tale that appeals to their individual lack of understanding of just what removing the burden of prejudice really is.

This superficiality is revealing itself rather nakedly. The Germans who insistent on not wanting to be left out of corrective action in Afghanistan a few years ago, hyperactively begging America to "not go it alone" were as desperate for a photo-op and image makeover as Wowereit is today. But alas:

German politicians Tuesday urged Barack Obama not to call for greater troop contributions from Europeans in Afghanistan when he outlines his plans for US foreign policy in a major speech in Berlin on Thursday.

"It makes no sense to make demands that partners cannot fulfil," Rainer Arnold, a parliamentary defense spokesman for the Social Democrats (SPD), told the online edition of Der Spiegel news magazine.

The SPD, the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's broad coalition, has made clear that the additional 1,000 troops to be made available for Afghanistan, taking the deployment to a maximum 4,500, is as far as they are prepared to go.

Obama is widely expected to call for a greater European contribution to the NATO military effort in Afghanistan when he speaks on Thursday on how US foreign policy will look if he is elected president.

As has been the case for four decades, they're working any angle they can for a free-ride AND the beneficial appearance lent to them by the US.

Rationally, they should either leave or earn it, but they're looking for neither. As usual, they want access to power at no risk, no cost, and even less awareness of the landscape of American culture.

But the Green Party's Deputy Parliamentary Leader voiced what many politicians, especially on the left, probably feel, when he told reporters, "Barack Obama's visit shows: there is another America."

Of course there is. There's always been a broad range of opinion and interests in the US. It's these "wise" Europeans who've been generally ignorant to that for decades, because they seem to defer to the most simplistic object lessons, and concepts requireing the least thought - all the while talking up their superiority in the face of the supposed "ignorance" of those many harbor a quiet resentment for.

The question for the Atmerican observer of transatlantic is why would we let that influence OUR choices when they're goal is to limit us based on a badly developed and thoroughly prejudiced knowledge of us?

A foreign entity engaging in partisan promotion is "positive irrigardless (sic)"? Are you sure?

Howard was plying open a rift between the US and the party in power in the UK. Foe the Bush White House to snub limit the interference of a fellow conservative when there was serious work to do with Blair is precisely the opposite of the venality you're trying to characterize it with.

On the other hand getting Berlin to pony up for half of the cost of Obama-palooza doesn't just make them suckers, but doing preceisely the opposite of what the White Hoouse did to Howard.

And if there was an issue between Schroeder's and Bush's government, it was between elected leaders, not an excercise in manipulating another nation's election. You'll recall that there were many of us who gave the Russian/French/German apporach to America a name: the axis of weasels.

This is NOT statecraft. This is a crowd of Germans high on a fantasy of something they wish they could have for themselves going gaga over an American CANDIDATE. I repeat: this is not statecraft.

As for it's motives, David Aaronovitch has it nailed. The reason they are for it today is out of a hatred of Bush and a longstanding resentment of any American leader. Sooner or later they will hate Obama too if he represents America. If he doesn't represent America, the new kiddie-level meme will be "racism".

What will be has always been. A each stage a mechanism to play out resentment will be found. The press will amplify it.

It will be found in any silly example availiable, anywhere in America alone, that is. In the mean time, Thugs in Europe will continue to act out their racism in a way unimaginable in America after the 1950s, but will only be noted later on in quiet and sad reflection over a local criticism whose attention will bear far less interest than fixating on the virtual "big satan". You could virtually write the script now.

This, perhaps. Which is patently obvious. It's also an interpretaton of the obelisk-form without straying from the [uel=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasces]fasci[/url] theme originated from ancient Rome much like the Scythian bundle.

As Andreas Schockenhoff of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union pointed out, even just this early history of the monument could be enough to give one doubts about Obama’s choice of venue. “The Berlin Victory Column … is dedicated to the victory over neighbors who are today our European friends and allies,” he told the Sunday edition of the popular German tabloid Bild. “I think the symbolism is unfortunate.”
The point was apparently lost, however, on House majority leader Nancy Pelosi. In conversation with the Berlin daily Die Tagespiegel, Pelosi defended the choice of the Siegessäule by noting that “There are symbolic sites that belong to the whole world.” The French found the symbolism of the column so universal that after the Second World War they wanted to blow it up. They would eventually be satisfied with merely removing the (since restored) bas-reliefs depicting the French humiliation at Sedan.

It certainly isn't consistent with my own 5 years in Berlin. Pew, by the way, plays quite a bit of statistical toncil-hockey for sponsered causes like Soros' "Open Democracy", the Tides Foundation and the BBC.
Other than that, this is probably a good time to look in on anyone who gets that excited about any candidate they can't vote for - by going to their place and checking their freezer for human heads.

Clutching at straws?

In its 2007 survey, Pew found that 65% of Germans dislike American ideas about democracy; 64% dislike American ways of doing business; 83% have a negative view about the spread of American ideas.

Are you sure you aren't being too narrowly selective? Both your selected positive and this evidense of a negative can't concurrently be true without the majority of respondents either being two-faced or wildly misinterpreted.

It's what always goes in Germany: young people (and now old based on longstanding habits) getting out and getting worked up about something happening elsewhere in the world that Europe wil do nothing about (ever,) and thinking that the march/ lovefest/ riot is in fact "doing something" about said fixation. It's usually bound up with the kind of simple logic that will fit on an A3 size poster: hunger, war, something bad going on in the world that their favortie methods can't do anything about, and it shows itself either through impotent rage or overwhelming emotional support that results in nothing positive happening to any meaningful degree.

Think of the giant bedsheet ribbon of the "one" campaign which freed or fed no-one. Think of Amnesty International, in whose entire history has only managed to free one political prisoner through the pressure of hundreds of thousands of doners and marchers.

What one poll said over another in an age where these studies are customized to provide results, is nearly irrelevant. "What the World Thinks of America," the Pew study in 2004 structured and timed to support Kerry, was funded by George Soros' "Open Democracy Fouundation" in quiet cooperation with Move-On and Tides Foundation. These were NOT set up out of curiosity, they were commissioned for concealed partisan political purposes.

Nonetheless, timing aside, the polls themselves should be useful in the absense of anything else. But how is it that polls taken abroad asking questions to those who have little direct involvement in US affairs should matter? Is it THEIR vote that's at stake? Any real number of THEIR troops (who would get a bus ticket out of Afghanistan if it really got ugly)? Hell no.

As for the German readings, it's the simple difference between statesmanship, something young and old Europeans find "scary" and "pandering to popularity" which the young confuse for leadership.
It isn't going to give you the simple fairy tale of the "Wiked Witch of America" versus the peaceful little European Dorothy that many Europeans are looking for, especially when they're suddenly pretending that they didn't mean all those awful things they said, and want us to thank them for their mass protests over the past 30 years.

In turn, we're told that that parasitism of unceasing European public complaint is "wisdom" or whatever number of other things being spun as a positive... Seen from a distance, it's as impossible to buy as their sudden "non-political" support when ther happens to be a foreign candidate in town.

Soros did not likely docter the study, but commissioned it with someone having some clear choices being made about the places it was taken and the screwy sample sizes - i.e. an overwhelming number of Uni students in Sydney, etc.

What about those American mass protests?

They weren't about Germans, and they weren't an anually repeated ongoing expression of helplessness, or pedantic habit. The Germans ones are rarely about anyone OTHER that some variant on the notion that the US government is eating your young. THEIR strawman (nearly to the expense of their capacity to reason) was the US, so how you get to ME making a strawman out of the DOZENS of protests that went violent I had to live with in Berlin.

As for the notion that it was in any way "non-political," it WAS partisan and political, no matter where it was. As is trying to tell me that western Europe's very real history of parasitism dare not be mentioned.

Why you seem so uncomfortable with the notion that there is more than one view out there is really quite telling.