Obama Abroad: Not Just Another Rock Star

[DeepModem Mom]

Congressional Quarterly Politics: Obama Abroad: Not Just Another Rock Star
July 30, 2008

American media coverage of Sen. Barack Obama ’s trip through Europe has focused on the rock star quality of his reception. Given the celebrity-crazed culture in which we live, journalists are right to be wary of anything political that resembles the superficiality associated with the words and deeds of most celebrities. Celebrity is thus a dangerous thing for a politician. It undermines the more important aim of being taken seriously where it most counts. Indeed, a cottage industry has arisen dedicated to emphasizing Obama’s celebrity status and thereby de-emphasizing any substantive achievements he might bring to the job as president.

It is true, as fashion observers have noted, that Obama possesses the perfect frame upon which to hang a Zegna suit, and his considerable rhetorical skills make him stand out with the confidence and grace of the old- fashioned Cary Grant kind. Both are welcome changes from the visual and verbal clumsiness of George W. Bush , and they are political up to a point. But this is not the sort of change Obama wants us to believe in....

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What attracts many Europeans, especially the young, to Obama goes well beyond his cool demeanor or rock star persona. Obama reassures a Europe grown increasingly nervous about the improvident exercises of American power. It is because of his early and informed opposition to the Iraq War that Obama offers hope not only to Americans but to those who understand that what happens in America does not stay in America. What Obama represents for many Europeans is hope that the era of avoidable and extraordinarily bad judgment will soon be over, and the (Berlin) speech was pitched in tones meant to amplify the campaign words already well-known among European observers of all things American. The hugely positive response Obama received was thus anything but shallow rock star worship of the sort that many American commentators mistakenly assumed it to be.

Beneath the soaring rhetoric of how we can change the world, it was not a particularly new or certainly not a grand new utopian vision that Obama was peddling. By contrast, it was Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and the Neo-cons who were making the case for a radically new world order. Obama’s pitch seems to be for a return to sanity in foreign policy and a commitment to making globally consequential decisions that are grounded firmly in reality. No more fantasies about citizens of an occupied nation greeting us as liberators....

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=news-000002929043