STRASBOURG, France — President Barack Obama offered a gentle rebuke to star-struck Europeans Friday that it’s time for them to stop blaming the United States for all the world’s ills — especially now that they’ve got an American president they can embrace.
Obama’s words briefly quieted a rapturous crowd of German and French students in a sports arena in this Rhine River town, as he told them Europeans had scapegoated the world’s lone remaining superpower for too long.
He decried “an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious.” And he suggested that America had done its part to break with the past — not least of all by electing him — and now it was time for Europe to do the same.
“America is changing but it cannot be America alone that changes,” he said.
He ticked off exactly what steps the U.S. was taking — closing Guantanamo Bay prison, ending torture, trying to confront climate change — but it wasn’t until he took questions that he reminded Europe of the burden they must share with the United States.
“Al Qaeda is still a threat,” Obama reminded the audience. “We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK.”
Obama was careful to spread the blame as he sought to reset a trans-Atlantic alliance that he said has “drifted.” In his remarks, Obama looked back to a nation that elected him just a few months ago and said it, too, had at times “showed arrogance” and “been dismissive even derisive” toward its European cousins.
“In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world,” Obama said.
The European audience was getting a taste of the president as politician. Reprising a role he sometimes played in the campaign, Obama dished out some tough love.
Whether it was preaching self-responsibility to black fathers in Chicago, pushing fuel standards to automakers in Detroit or drawing boos from teachers unions for praising merit pay, Obama effectively would say: You may not like it to hear this, but it’s good for you.
And if citing the change symbolized by a middle name he rarely mentions didn’t get the point across, he also conceded: "We got sidetracked by Iraq and we have not fully recovered that initial insight that we have a mutual interest in ensuring that organizations like Al Qaeda cannot operate.
"I think it is important for Europe to understand that even though I am president and George Bush is not president, Al Qaeda is still a threat."
The line was hardly a throwaway. Obama surely knows that for all of his personal popularity in Europe, he is still the head of a nation that must protect its own interests — whether by hunting down terrorists or fending off global regulation of Wall Street. And sometimes those methods can be a bit rough or force him to deviate from a broad global consensus of what’s needed.
Even Obama’s signs of change come with caveats. He’s promised to try to close Gitmo this year but is struggling to find other countries to take the detainees. He’s promised not to torture but set up a panel to examine whether the CIA should have more leeway than the military when it comes to interrogating prisoners. He’s trying to withdraw from Iraq but recently ordered 21,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
Obama’s message echoed the speech he gave in Berlin last summer — but with the boldness that a head of state can use and that a candidate usually avoids.
The speech was a recognition, said Obama officials, that America must begin rebuilding its relationship with some of its old allies by first being honest and candid about some of the issues that are critical to the relationship but usually are avoided. And it came at a moment in his schedule where he was apart from summits and bilateral sessions and could speak more freely.
It was no accident that it took place on the same day that he did meet with the two signature “Old Europe” nations, France and Germany, that were derided in the run-up to a war that did so much to drive a wedge between Europe and America.
But with Iraq now stabilized and Bush, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder out of office, the days of “freedom fries” seemed a distant memory.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, welcoming Obama to France with "The Star-Spangled Banner" at an elegant 18th-century palace before the town hall, might have even outdone Gordon Brown in heaping praise on the new American president.
“It feels really good to be able to work with a U.S. president who wants to change the world and who understands that the world does not boil down to simply American frontiers and borders — that is a hell of a good piece of news for 2009,” said Sarkozy.
He even did a bit of his tough love turn, endorsing America’s Afghanistan strategy with a reminder to France “that when New York was crucified, this could have happened in any other capital city of any democratic state. It wasn't New York that was being targeted. It was democracies at large.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, though less effusive than her dramatic French counterpart, also stated her country’s willingness to bear a burden in Afghanistan.
And she acknowledged the difference in Obama’s approach to Iran from his predecessor.
“We are very gratified to know that the United States wants to have a fresh beginning, a fresh start in this relationship,” Merkel said.
If the leaders of France and Germany were happy to have a new partner across the Atlantic, some of the citizens of the two countries seemed downright giddy about Obama.
Or at least the ones who took the time to come hear him speak in a bit of Iowa politics on the Rhine.
The cameras, screaming fans and jockeying for good seats were all present, but Stevie Wonder was swapped for Sousa and the accents sounded different at this first overseas town hall meeting.
A group of high school girls who made the trip down from nearby Heidelberg, Germany, to see Obama were jumping up and down and giggling after shaking his hand.
Asked if he met their expectation, they belted out in unison: “Ja!”
Linda Strecker, one of the students, said: “He’s perfect in comparison to Bush.”
A French political science student studying in Strasbourg sounded a lot like the American counterparts she studied with in a study abroad program in Louisiana last year.
“We know he’s not going to change everything, but for the new generation it’s something big: hope,” said Morgan Studele.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20090403/pl_politico/20874(The MSM can say our President is in campaign mode but he is working hard to put American back on track with the world. In my opinion he has made huge in roads with this trip to Europe.)
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