It's Obama Week Here at Radio Free Mike

It’ll calm down later, I promise. In real life we don’t make heroes out of politicians, and in real life most of us here at Radio Free Mike don’t expect Obama to purge the nation of sin. But we won’t get off this topic until Friday at the earliest, so I’m afraid Obama will be this week’s official theme.

Here’s a little something from the comments section about Charles Krauthammer. If you’ve read it, sorry. But for Obama Week it goes front and center.

Krauthammer has brought his immense erudition and expertise about Germany to bear on the matter of where Obama’s staff thought he should speak in Berlin. Let’s take it apart piece by piece, shall we?

First of all: Krauthammer’s a puffball. He blows himself up like a bullfrog, and people get all quivery. No need for that.

“What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn,” writes Krauthammer. Wrong. See below. “President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final “tear down this wall’ liquidation.” Wrong. Reagan’s speech was theater. (If he knew in 1987 that the Soviet Union would fall two years later, why was Reagan funding petty little anti-communist death squads in Central America, at the expense of democracy?) “When President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.” Yes, but what does that have to do with the Brandenburg Gate? Berlin’s mayor welcomed him and set the itinerary. Berlin’s current mayor welcomed Obama, and liked the idea of a speech at the Brandenburg Gate.

Krauthammer is just making this shit up. There are no rules like this in Berlin. He’s just inventing stuff to correspond with two big presidential speeches in Berlin that he and his readers remember with some measure of awe. But Bill Clinton spoke in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 1994 without any of these supposed qualifications. No one remembers that speech. So why isn’t it possible that Obama just wants to be a new Clinton (not such a vaulting ambition)? Krauthammer doesn’t bring this up because it does him no good rhetorically.

He also writes: “It’s as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)”

No one “demanded” anything. Krauthammer seems to have mislaid the fact that America just opened a new embassy at the Brandenburg Gate. Obama’s team obviously looked into reasonable places to speak, and at least a few people in Berlin—including the mayor, and Germany’s vice-chancellor—who found themselves at odds with the chancellor for pure political reasons—thought the Brandenburg Gate might work. No one had made any firm decisions. The location seemed not just glamorous but practical. It caps a boulevard where thousands of people can stand. If you just turn them around and face them the other direction, your man has the Victory Column for a backdrop. This isn’t real mysterious.

Krauthammer also writes:

Obama may think he’s King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty. After all, in the words of his own slogan, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which, translating the royal “we,” means: ” I am the one we’ve been waiting for.”

“Translating” the royal we, or imposing it, in your puffball capacity as a Beltway columnist? It’s obvious that Obama was trying to sound like Kennedy here, not Queen Elizabeth or King Canute. He said “we,” and meant it.

Obama may be ambitious and vain, but Bill Clinton looked like more of a gaseous frat boy in 1992. (He turned out slightly better, but I don’t want him back.) When you set up “Barack Obama” as a hollow piñata you can take as many whacks with your cane as you like, and the converted will cheer. The problem for Krauthammer is that Obama has been saying substantial things. Watch the half-hour speech on foreign policy I posted below. He lays it all out in plain, unadorned, un-tricky English. This may be hard to believe after eight years, but just because a politician can speak in coherent sentences doesn’t mean he has nothing to say. I’m not about to argue that Obama has no ego, but sooner or later people will realize that his critics haven’t even begun to answer him back.

     posted 22 July 2008 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. I was at the ‘94 Clinton speech and don’t remember a word of it. That might be at least partially to do with the fact that it was scorching hot that day and various diplomatic niceties at the Reichstag kept the Clintons and Kohls from appearing on time. But appearances like that are the Chinese food of rhetoric: an hour later you’re hungry again. This one might be a bit more substantive.

    And as for Brandenburg Gate appearances, hell, Prince played there in ‘94, too, as part of the MTV Europe awards.

    — Ed Ward    Jul 22, 12:36 pm    #

  2. Right. Presidents and royalty. Maybe Merkel had a point.

    — Mike    Jul 22, 12:46 pm    #

  3. I fail to see the newsworthiness in an ambitious politician (let alone one going for the POTUS) having an ego. I should hope he does. OK, I don’t want Spartacus in office pushing a will to power, but I certainly don’t want Mother Teresa in there either.

    — Ben    Jul 22, 06:49 pm    #

  4. Krauthammer is a relic of the Reagan years, a has-been among party hacks who knows his GOP brand now has all the sex-appeal of flesh-eating-disease with the American public … funny how they’re always after Obama for anything BUT whatever he just got done saying. Almost as though they’ve lost the ability to engage in any substantial debate, on ANY subject, from so many years of playing the Nixon game of attack-ad gutter-politics … too bad for them, it’s not 1988 anymore – & there’s no Willie Horton scandal handy to pull their bacon out of the fire.

    — jim    Jul 23, 11:03 pm    #

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