Mosh Pit Of Anti-Americanism Awaits Barack Obama

Europe's Mosh Pit Of Anti-Americanism Awaits Barack Obama With Open Arms
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, July 23, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election 2008: Barack Obama's big Berlin rally is being sold to U.S. voters as reason to vote for him. Yes, Germans do love Obama, but a look at what they think of the rest of us raises questions about the cheering.

A May-June Gallup poll released July 23 shows that 62% of Germans want Obama elected president over just 27% who would prefer John McCain. It's a German landslide.

No surprise. Citizens of the country Obama chose for a big showy overseas campaign rally hold some of the most virulent sentiment against President Bush ever recorded.

Five years after the Iraq War's start, a June 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey found 85% of Germans still have little or no faith that Bush will do the right thing, and 72% think the U.S. effort in Iraq — no thanks to Germany — will fail.

Opinions about leaders are one thing. But Germany's negative attitudes extend well beyond Bush to a significant loathing of America, mostly based on its global influence and its success.

Obama may demand on the campaign trail that no one dare question his patriotism, but for Germans, disliking the U.S. is nothing to hide. Yet this is the place Obama's team thought would be best to hold a rally to boost his campaign.

Pew's 2008 survey found that 34% of Germans don't like Americans at all or in part, and 61% regard the U.S. as headed for something like history's ash heap, to be supplanted by China.

That is relevant to why Germans are cheering for Obama. He has consistently expounded a worldview that espouses the moral equivalency of nations, rather than importance of U.S. leadership. He's a big fan of letting the U.N. make America's foreign policy decisions, consistent with shrinking U.S. influence in the world.

He has also expressed embarrassment at the U.S. compared with Europe, for example, in its mastery of languages — as if the lingual fragmentation of Europe's tiny nations vs. the continental span of the U.S. were comparable conditions for learning languages.

Not a word, of course, about America's military, financial or technical superiority over Europe. Just lots of European-style mantras about American differences being somehow proof of inferiority.

An America Firster he's not. Heck, it was a battle just to get him, a candidate for the highest office in the land, to pin an American flag to his lapel. No wonder they cheer Obama in Germany.

But if his talk syncs with German attitudes, it might not be entirely in American interests. Last year Pew asked even more pointed questions of Obama's cheering German fans.

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. If Germans think that and Obama's their man, what does that say about what Obama's selling?

Obama did not pick Germany as his venue for a rally Thursday because he wanted to change German perceptions about America. He picked it because the pro-Obama mania was already in place and the polls were sympathetic.

Oh, he insists it's no campaign rally, but just a . . . speech at the Victory Column, as if every visiting senator does that. That claim's belied by the slick, hip fliers printed up for Obama's rally to draw in Germans who loathe America. The mainstream media can be counted on to hide the Che Guevara T-shirts and the hammer and sickle banners that will undoubtedly be in Berlin as Obama presents his famous "hope" and "change" rhetoric.

Why will they cheer? Because they see a less influential America coming with an Obama presidency. They see bigger government, fewer personal freedoms and a lower standard of living — in short, Americans a lot more European. For them, Obama's rise means, at long last, an end to those dreaded SUVs.

The jealousy is palpable.

Among Germans, 88% believe the U.S. influences events in their country despite a simultaneous belief that the U.S. is a spent power; 47% think that influence is a bad thing; only 12% call it good. And 80% believe America has a negative impact on Germany's economy — an idea so plainly wrong as to be laughable.

Blaming America first may be nice for Germany's anti-Americans. But trying to influence U.S. voters with a campaign rally of people who loathe much of what America stands for strikes us as poor judgment.

Maybe the truth about those who cheer Obama and his lollapalooza world tour ought to be better known to U.S. voters.



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