“People of Berlin. People of the World. This is our moment. This is our time.”
So proclaims a not-yet-elected President on foreign soil to 200,000 Germans. It was a dangerous venue for our President-in-waiting, for not a single American has cast a general election vote. And those blue-collar Americans who believe that an American President should look out for Americans first can be excused for wondering whether Mr. Obama shares the same view.
Obama was wise to go overseas to visit heads of state, and to his credit he managed to talk with a dozen world leaders without committing an obvious gaffe. His staff deserves credit for its management of what was a logistical nightmare. Here’s betting he will regret the speech in Berlin.
It was vain. It was presumptuous. And Mr. Obama is not running for President of the world.
The walls of Berlin of which he spoke did not come down because the world came together; nor did they come down because President Reagan flew to Moscow and played patty cake with Mikhail Gorbachev. They came down because Ronald Reagan used the military and economic might of the United States to stand down evil.
If McCain can ever find his voice, he has been given an opening with Obama’s words. For in the Gold Plated rhetoric of his address one discerns a utopia of optimism absent reality. The world has never stood as one. It never will. Because in this world there will always be those who have something others want. There will always be those who hate, ever ready to kill those they don’t like. Good Presidents understand that. Wise Presidents understand that we are sometimes called to stand alone. Walls and secure borders sometimes serve the cause of peace.
If this becomes a referendum on charisma, Obama wins in a landslide. It falls to McCain to make sure it doesn’t. He now has plenty of ammunition once he learns to shoot straight—the Berlin speech, the flip-flops on trade, the conditions of tea with Ahmadinejad, wiretapping of terrorists, withdrawal from Iraq, abortion, the death penalty, gun control and Obama’s the strange contortions on domestic energy policy. It will be McCain’s fault if he loses.
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