Obamania in Europe

Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of Die Zeit, and one of more interesting Europeans out there, tries to make sense of Obama’s appeal in Europe.

If he ran in Germany, Obama would carry the country by a landslide, with 67 percent of the vote. But there is no gold in them thar numbers, only disappointment. By vast margins, Germans and Europeans believe in Obama as the Savior & Redeemer who will deliver them from the last eight years of George W. It’s like an exorcist fantasy: Once we can send Bush off into the desert, like the scapegoat of the Israelites, we will be able to love America again. . . .
The Washington correspondent of another major left-of-center publication puts it in more practical terms: “Obama recognizes the limits of American power and influence. … The weight of the White House (in world affairs) is waning. … In this multipolar world not all the roads will lead through Washington.” For the new president (and there is no doubt in Europe that it will be Obama), this means “more cooperation, more UN, NATO, and EU.”

This, of course, is Europe’s favorite dream: a post-Bush America cut down to size and chastened, a meeker and more modest America, a more “European” (that is, a more social-democratic) America, which at last casts off some of its nastier capitalist habits. An America that is a lot more like us Europeans who have forgone power politics and sovereignty in favor of communitarian politics and integration.

Joffe makes clear that Europeans who think that way are fools (a common European trait).

Barack Obama is possessed of a pliable identity that oscillates between Barry and Barack, between White and Black, between the Harvard Law Review and the Chicago slums, between a leftish voting record in the Senate and a right-of-center message on the stump. He is neither saint nor softie, but the most consummate power politician to come out of Chicago since Richard Daley the Elder. Following classical electoral ritual in the U.S., Obama has been moving steadily to the right, be it on the death penalty, gun control, or Iraq. Europeans haven’t quite processed his pilgrimage to the center, and if they have, they seem not to care. . . .
Germans should have read the foreign-policy chapter in Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. There are passages in there which read like pure Bush–on unilateralist action, on the right of pre-emption, on playing the world’s “sheriff.” Obama’s upshot: “This will not change–nor should it.” This doesn’t mean more Bushism if Obama is elected. But it is a useful reminder that the U.S. plays in a league of its own–with global interest, with global military means, and with the willingness to use them.

In Berlin, hundreds of thousands will cheer a projection rather than a flesh-and-blood Obama on Thursday. After Inauguration Day, alas, Europe and the world will not face a Dreamworks president, but the leader of a superpower. Whether McCain or Obama, the 44th president will speak more nicely than did W. in his first term. He will also pay more attention to the “decent opinions of mankind.” But he will still preside over the world’s largest military, economic, and cultural power.

I certainly hope Joffe is right.