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Obama Echoes Reagan in Call for Global Unity (JENNIFER PARKER, July 24, 2008, ABC News)

"I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen -- a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world," Obama said, standing before Berlin's famed Victory Column in Berlin. [...]

"People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time," he said.

A "citizen of the world?" And they wonder why he can't convince voters he's a patriot?

Note how differently Reagan cast himself, and us, in his Bitburg speech, as crusaders for the downtrodden rather than as one-worlders:

[T]oday freedom-loving people around the world must say: I am a Berliner. I am a Jew in a world still threatened by anti-Semitism. I am an Afghan, and I am a prisoner of the Gulag. I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.

In Obamaworld there apparently are no such victims nor any oppressors nor any moral imperative for us to intervene on the side of the one against the other. When he does get around to mentioning some folks who could use our help it's bloggers--flattering to his base but rather trivial--and he's asking a bunch of Euros if we "world citizens" are going to help. We all know the world answer.

MORE:
Obama’s Ego Trip: Will the candidate’s European progress backfire? (Nicholas Wapshott, 24 July 2008, City Journal)

There is little doubt that Europeans would overwhelmingly vote for Obama if given the chance. The Guardian reported last week that the British, who turned on Tony Blair after he tied himself to President Bush’s mast and who generally disapprove of the Iraq War, prefer Obama over John McCain by 53 percent to 11. (The remaining 36 percent expressed no opinion.) In Germany, according to the Telegraph, the figures are even more stark, with Obama attracting 67 percent support to McCain’s 6.

Part of Obama’s popularity has to do with Europe’s intense antipathy toward Bush. The president has made little effort to woo the Europeans over the last seven years, and he studiously ignored their leaders’ efforts, through the United Nations, to postpone the invasion of Iraq. [...]

The continent is considerably to the left of America, and its people are generally more liberal on such matters as abortion, the death penalty, and gun control. On all three issues, Obama has shown himself prepared to shift to more conservative positions in order to be more electable. If the Europeans have noticed this pragmatic change of tack, they have put it out of their minds. Further, Obama’s early and long-standing opposition to the Iraq War has made him a standard bearer for an anti-Americanism that is now rife throughout the European Union. Many Europeans see his unusual family background and his mixed ethnicity as confirmation of their belief that he is not quite wholly American—that he is even, perhaps, un-American.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 24, 2008 7:36 PM