http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/01/barack-obama-g20Someone tore up the script. Here's how it was meant to go. Barack Obama was supposed to sweep into Europe on his first major trip abroad as the new JFK, greeted by adoring fans moistly waving little American flags. His progress would be part celebrity world tour, part celebration of the end of the Bush era. A needy Gordon Brown would bask in the Obama glow, hoping its rays would improve his own deathly pallor. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe's leaders would fall to their knees, humbly agreeing to any request made by the visiting emperor, mindful that in a choice between them and Obama, their own electorates would choose Obama every time.
That was the way it was supposed to be. Instead, Obama arrived last night on the eve of what organisers promise will be a raucous day of anti-globalisation protest on London's streets, the demonstrators' previous loathing of George Bush rapidly transferred to the commanders of the ailing world economy. Brown will still crave the Obama magic dust, but he may find his American visitor has less of it to sprinkle around, beleaguered as he is by rising opposition from both left and right at home, even the first muttered grumbles that the 44th president might turn out to be neither a new FDR nor a JFK, but a JEC - Jimmy Carter. To cap it all, the Europeans are refusing to bow down before him.
Instead, he and Brown stand together, supposedly the representatives of Anglo-American turbocapitalism, struggling to push the statist French and Germans - and this is the bit that was in nobody's script - leftward.
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