Europe Becomes Obama’s Re-Election Campaign ‘Prop’
President Barack Obama is back in the United States after a six-day trip to Europe that from start to finish was carefully planned to quell criticism from opponents that he is a lightweight on the world stage. With his poll numbers at all-time lows in the United States, undiscerning Europeans dutifully turned out in droves to fawn over Obama, thus handing the president (who has mostly ignored them since taking office) enduring images that his campaign managers are sure to use as political fodder in the months ahead.
Book-ended by picture-perfect visits to Ireland and Poland in an effort to reach out to important political constituencies back home, Obama also visited France and Britain, where he upgraded the relationship from “special” to “essential.”
Obama began his European tour in Ireland in an ostensible effort to “rediscover” the roots of his great, great, great grandfather. To cheers from an exuberant crowd numbering 25,000 in Dublin, the American president began his evening address with the greeting: “Hello Dublin! Hello Ireland! My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”
Writing for London’s Daily Telegraph, columnist Cristina Odone said Obama’s trip to Ireland was “naked electioneering.” Wrote Odone: “Barack Obama is no more O’Bama than I am O’Done. And the Irish know it. They’re watching, bemused, as the most powerful man in the world comes to visit their President and Taoiseach, then visit Moneygall, home of his great-great-great grandfather. They know it’s not their smiling eyes he’s visiting for — but for the 35,975,855 Americans who claim Irish roots. That’s a sizeable chunk of the electorate and geographically strategic, too: Irish-Americans are numerous in precisely those states, like Ohio and Pennsylvania, that often prove to be decisive during presidential elections.”
She continued: “Obama’s O’Bama act will strike Irish Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic as highly hypocritical not only because, as his autobiography ‘Dreams from My Father’ shows, his Kenyan heritage, not the Irish one, shaped his vision; but also because as President, Obama has pursued an anti-Catholic agenda that has been unapologetically pro-abortion and pro stem cell research. His stand on the death penalty is no different from previous administrations, and his U-turn on Guantanamo Bay betrays a disregard for human life that offends Catholic teaching. For Catholic Ireland, his trip is not so much the return of the Prodigal Son as the photo-op of the wayward cousin.”
Odone suspects Obama’s “Machiavellian tactic” will backfire: “The Irish will spin it as a PR triumph capable of regenerating their tourism rather than as a politically momentous occasion; the Irish Americans will quite rightly view the trip as a desperate, last ditch appeal to them. O’Bama, oh why sink so low?”
With the sought-after photos of adulating Irishmen in hand, Obama left Ireland as quickly as he arrived amid fears that Air Force One could be grounded by a volcanic ash cloud blowing down from Iceland. But not before posing for one last photo, of Obama sipping a pint of Guinness beer with ordinary folks at Ollie Hayes pub in Moneygall.
Obama’s next campaign stop was Britain, where analysts said the president was hoping to piggyback on the popularity of the British royal family in the United States after 23 million Americans tuned in to watch Prince William and Kate Middleton marry. To be sure, Obama remains highly popular in Britain despite having ejected Sir Winston Churchill from the White House in what was the first foreign policy decision of his presidency.
Letting bygones be bygones, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip welcomed the Obamas to Buckingham Palace with pomp and pageantry and a 41 gun salute and a state dinner. Obama returned the favor by botching a toast to the queen and refusing to drink the royal tap water. But he regained control of his image by becoming only the fourth foreign dignitary to address Parliament at Westminster Hall since World War II.
Obama, who is widely viewed as the least Anglophile of recent presidents, received a standing ovation from star-struck British MPs after he announced a new, more sensitive U.S. foreign policy, one in which America would follow rather than lead a changing world. “We will proceed with humility and the knowledge that we cannot dictate outcomes abroad,” Obama told an enraptured audience. One Member of Parliament described the scene of fawning British politicians eager to capture some of Obama’s stardust as “political Beatlemania.”
Obama then teamed up with British Prime Minister David Cameron to challenge students at London’s Globe Academy to a ping-pong match. Obama also co-penned an essay with Cameron for the Times of London, which states that the bond between America and Britain is not just a special relationship but “an essential relationship — for us and for the world.” The same article says — without a hint of irony — that bilateral relations under Obama are closer than those between former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former President Ronald Reagan, whose partnership helped end the Cold War.
Never mind that just six months ago, at a White House photo opportunity with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Obama gave the “essential relationship” honor to France. On January 10, 2011, Obama said: “We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people.”
As the British historian Niall Ferguson said in an interview on BBC Radio 4: “The British think they’re in a special relationship, but the Americans have quite a few special relationships and I don’t think that we’re the most special.”
Ferguson also said that Obama had been “mugged by reality” and was now pursuing a surprisingly neo-conservative position. “Actually, the differences between these two presidents [Obama and Bush] are remarkably small on foreign policy, which is deeply ironic when you consider how many Europeans thought the Messiah had arrived to redeem America after the wickedness of the Bush years.”
Obama’s next stop on the campaign trail was France, where he attended the two-day Group of Eight Summit in Deauville. After signing the Patriot Act by autopen just minutes before a midnight deadline, Obama won the only two foreign policy achievements of his entire six days in Europe: The leaders of the G8 gave “strong support” to Obama’s insistence that Israel must return to its pre-1967 borders. They also adopted a unified position that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi must go.
Meanwhile, Obama pledged $40 billion to promote democracy in the oil-rich Muslim world, this despite having led the United States close to bankruptcy.
Obama’s final campaign stop was Poland. After having sold out the Poles in a failed effort to appease Russia — which had objected to American plans to build a missile defense site close to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad – Obama said he would send U.S. F-16s and C-130s to train in Poland. It is a consolation prize Obama’s campaign managers hope will appease the 10 million potential U.S. voters of Polish origin.
Not all Poles were willing to play Obama’s game. Former Polish President Lech Walesa cancelled a meeting with Obama because he did not want to be part of a photo opportunity. Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 for his role in helping to bring down communism, told Poland’s TVN24: “It’s difficult to tell journalists what you’d like to say to the president of a superpower. This time I won’t tell him, I won’t meet him, it doesn’t suit me.”
Not surprisingly, Obama ended his campaign stop at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, where he tried to convince American Jewish voters as well as a group of Holocaust survivors that “I will always be there for Israel.” This just one week after Obama threw Israel under the bus to appease the Palestinians.
Washington Post columnist George Will, speaking on ABC News, said Obama suffered a major strategic defeat while he was in Europe. Will said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demonstrated that he has more of a grasp on foreign policy than Obama with the U.S. Congress.
“While the president was overseas, Netanyahu speaks to a joint session of Congress,” Will said. “At the end of which you could ask the question whose Middle East policy has more support in the Congress of the United States — the president’s, or the prime minister of Israel’s? The answer is the prime minister of Israel’s policy.”
Obama did, however, achieve his goal of creating video for his 2012 campaign ads. As the presidential campaign gears up, Americans can expect to see lots of footage of Obama with the royal family as well as images of the visits to Ireland and Poland, coupled with public compliments from European leaders about the successful operation that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, all packaged to reinforce Obama’s national security credentials.
At a news conference in Poland, Obama said: “Even at a time where I spend most of my day thinking about our economy and how to put folks back to work and how to make sure that we’re reducing gas prices and how we stabilize the housing market and how we innovate and adapt and change so that we are fully competitive in the 21st century and maintain our economic leadership, I want the American people to understand we’ve got to leave room for us to continue our tradition of providing leadership when it comes to freedom, democracy, human rights.” One remaining question: Is Obama for real?
I love the notion of the “wickedness of the Bush years” which is held by the mass of uninformed drones of the UK and the EU in general. These idiots don’t know wicked at all. Just as the BBC keeps the drones from knowing the truth, the MSM in the USA has to work overtime to keep the underhanded agenda of this president from overwhelming us with it’s rotten stench. We never knew what really wicked was until Obama, the worst president in history and surly the biggest liar and threat to our founding values and principles and American way of life. The EU has been a bust for people of europe and no savior is on the horizon. What we know in the USA is that we the people are going to have to take back our country from these Obama control freaks. Maybe the people of Europe will wake up to the source of their misery. We can only hope. There is no way that Obama has anything but contempt for UK in particular and the west in general.
Tommy you are spot on. you almost summed up my contempt for the biggest phony to ever walk the face of earth,I am still amased at the thought there are so many IDIOTS in this country!
at the end of the collumn you ask is obama real. obama is as phony as a nine dollar bill and the biggest lie’r since bill(slick)willie clinton,
Obama is simply trying to recreate his outrageous “Berlin Tour” during the 2008 campaign, where he decided to make speeches in Europe as a candidate. But there is one major difference between then and now. HIS RECORD. Obama’s record in offfice has been a pathetic one, especially when it comes to either the economy or foreign policy. Obama now has to defend this record in 2012, and in the United States, NOT in Europe. And if you think we’re broke now as a country, just wait until Obamacare kicks in. Then you will really see money flying out of the Federal Government. Of course, once that happens then taxes would necessarily have to skyrocket to pay for all this. Yep, as Ricky Recardo said in “I Love Lucy,” Obama will have a lot of “Splainin” to do to the American public in 2012. And a hundred trips to Europe isn’t going to change any of that.
Sorry, but Obama is counting on the vast majority of Americans IGNORING his record — just as they did in 2008. All the awful stuff in his record was pointed out over and over and over again, and people dismissed it — Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, voting “present” all the time (except on killing born-alive babies; he fought vigorously to keep infanticide legal), Pakistan, the dirty tricks he used to knock all his opponents off the ballot in previous elections, the hiding of school records, losing his law license, announcing his plans to dismantle the U.S. military but create his own personal domestic army, SEIU/ACORN/Alinsky, the “bitter clinger” comments, etc., etc., etc. All that stuff was out there, and people willfully ignored it. I saw them do it. No matter how much we pointed out to them, no matter how many times they said, “Hmmm, that’s awful,” they turned around and voted for the bastard anyway. And they were able to do this because of the constant, unrelenting, merciless, 24/7 drumbeat of the “mainstream” media. Do you really suppose the MSM is not ready to do that all over again? Hell, they’re already doing it. They never stopped.
My one hope is that this next time around, MAYBE people who ignored all the facts for the sake of the self-congratulating, feel-good high they knew they would get from voting for the black man won’t find that quite so compelling any more. AND maybe we have a chance with all those folks who voted for Obama mostly because they were disgusted with Bush and tired of the Iraq war.
One thing for sure. We’ll have to do end runs around the MSM no matter what.
“As the British historian Niall Ferguson said in an interview on BBC Radio 4: ‘The British think they’re in a special relationship, but the Americans have quite a few special relationships and I don’t think that we’re the most special.’”
“When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near . . .”
Disengagement policy for Middle East Peace Process
Q. Remove the US as key broker via eroding political capital and credibility to perform that role.
A. Send Palestinians to the UN and use the US veto.
Q. Cancel military aid to Israel.
A. Increased deficit, resulting in larger DOD cuts, costing US jobs in key seats, forcing the Senators and Congress men and women to choose between military aid to Israel or their own reelection.
Q. UNSC
A. President Bush abstained during the UNSC OP Cast Lead, President Obama shapes resolutions to allow a vote and or abstain.
Bush and Condi Rice really sold Israel down the river during his second term.
I’ll probably never forgive him for that.
Nor for all the “religion of peace” crap.
The Powerline guys make the case that Professor O’Barry is quite the “Subversive President” secretly pushing his agenda and then jumping up and saying that he’s the only one that can lead it. It’s a neat trick and it appears to be working.
As I write this Professor O’Barry’s approval on RCP is an unbelievable 53%!!!
Wake up, America, we will not survive 8 years of this man.
The man is little more than a perpetual narcissictic candidate – mechanically speaking of “I” ad nauseum. His job, image, while the powers that put him in do all the behind-the-scenes work.
I doubt if he ever had a plan – like a Drafted Army bandleader-he’ll play whatever music his leftists overlords write for him – a mere programmed PC lqualified puppet.
America has been had and half of it loves it.
The real problem is an electorate so lacking in critical-thinking skills and the ability to judge character that they could elect this vacuous, warped, spiteful, self-centered juvenile.
If I’m reading this article correctly, Blarneystone O’Bama just promised most of Europe direct access to our already picked-clean pockets.
I’m not a math wizard, but many of you are. In round figures, what did his 6-day Euro campaign tour cost us, dollarwise?
Meanwhile, don’t you feel relieved and inspired to know the man who would be king spends most of his days thinking about jobs and the economy and housing?
Oh, wait. Thinking is not the same as doing. And doing is not the same as effective. And effective is not the same as affordable. And affordable is not…
Obama’s trip to Europe is all about the New World Order movement and his ultimate goal to be president of the World. When he campaigned, he said he would change the world. He does not consider himself a citizen of the United States. He sees himself as a citizen of the world. He is using his position as president as a springboard to his ultimate goal. Google Henry Kissinger and New World Order to find out how NWO supporters are relying on Obama to lead that movement that also needs unrest in the Middle East. That explains why he involved the U.S. in the Libyan unrest and supported the ouster of Egypt’s leader, yet remained silent on other unrests probably because they weren’t a part of the strategy.
Of all the countries in the world, the United States is the only country of its kind. Obama’s decisions are directed toward erasing our exceptionalism and bringing us down. This New World Order movement has been going on for at least 40 years, and people such as Kissinger see Obama as their opportunity to finally reach their goals. Americans need to expose who Obama’s NWO advisers are other than Kissinger and Soros. This movement needs to be stopped in its tracks.
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, we have to save ourselves in 2012.
Even UK’s ‘Telegraph’ spoke of his ‘..vapid..’ ‘..lacking any type of detail..’ of his moronic speech last week.
Don’t worry, Obamabots, The Telegraph was sure to put in its 1st paragraph of ‘Obama being a gifted speaker..’ though.
‘Gifted speaker’. To whom? The POTUS off-the-cuff comments are atrocious.
I’d call Obama a colossal failure, though he’s still got ~19 months to lower the bar even more.
Shameful.
The Democrat Plan for Fixing Medicare? Attack the GOP Plan! On May 31, 2011, in Democrat Party, TV Ads, by Eric Odom
http://campaigntrailreport.com/2011/05/31/the-dem…
“The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.” George Washington
As a european I recall only recall reading about BHO visiting that village in Ireland, having a Guinness™ and heading for the G8 or so…and that’s that. Cheerio, he ain’t done no damage.
“Hello Dublin! Hello Ireland! My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.”
That has to be one of the weirdest claims I’ve ever heard! Everyone knows that any Irish ancestry Obama has is on his (white) mother’s side of the family and everyone knows that the name “Obama” is his (black) father’s last name. So why would anyone on earth think that he had Irish ancestors named “Obama” or “O’Bama”? Or is he claiming that his mother’s side of the family also had the last name “Obama” (or “O’Bama”)? If not, his claim is completely surreal….
Sparky,
Are you for real? I’m no Obama fan but that was clearly a joke – a mood lightener if you will – in a speech that was nothing more than the standard boilerplate clap-trap any politician and/or celebrity gives when opening a speech to a friendly group. You may recall this little Irish joke ditty from before the elections:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HplZ_taHXLM
I’m all for having a go at the leader of the opposition party but lets avoid the nonsense eh?
Color me embarassed! The quote in the third paragraph was presented as a direct quote and I didn’t hear the original speech anywhere so I mistook the author’s sarcasm for Obama’s actual words. Apparently, I was wrong from the get-go…. Sorry about that!
> The British think they’re in a special relationship, but the Americans have quite a few special relationships
Well, this is obviously true about O-Lame-O. He’s just trying to be a high-priced Call Girl. But after it gets out in public that he’s told everyone they have a “special” relationship, they start to realize he’s just a cheap ordinary whore.
O-Lame-O is the most corrupt and incompetent U.S. president in my lifetime. More corrupt than Nixon; more incompetent than Carter. Hands. Down.
Obama didn’t need to kiss the blarney stone, he IS a blarney stone.
And why the hell as he doing in Britain anyway, he hates the Brits.
apparently the WH doesn’t even try to trot out a rationale for the urgent necessity for another pointless vacation by the grifter Obama family.
“To be sure, Obama remains highly popular in Britain…”
That’s a bit of a sweeping statement, isn’t it?
As a Brit I don’t see evidence of him being even popular, much less highly popular.
Obama is so very transparent. His purpose, the only real purpose the Obama administration has ever had, is the destruction of Israel through the creation of a UN-recognized “Palestinian” Muslim state. The vote of key European nations will determine the outcome of a Middle Eastern plan to ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state at its September 2011 annual meeting. Now it seems that Ireland is going to back a Palestinian state (which they were not previously in favor of) and so is Norway, England and France.
Here is an Associated Press article which outlines the upcoming UN vote:
Europe set for key Palestine role
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g3b_DbDKbGfeHFuw6HZfrEJpwaQw?docId=3c8276f35b6044be91104762cc628d1f
“where he upgraded the relationship from “special” to “essential.”
Huh? Special means we are close friends. Essential means we need each other, not that we like each other. How is that an “upgrade”?
Obama knew exactly what he meant when he chose the word “essential”. He meant, “I do not like you.”
I’m glad none is calculing us !
Obama when in Ireland said both the north and south were/are ‘occupied’.
This showed he didn’t have a clue.
The week before he came,Queen Elizabeth 2 as our Head of State visited the Republic of Ireland in an historic occasion.
It was the first time a sitting monarch had been there sinces the formation of
the Free State in the 1920′s.
It was a huge success and everybody wanted now to more forward.
The Good Friday agreement of 1998 maintains British soveignty in the North and can only change with the principle of consent.
The South has given up there ‘right’ to the 6 counties.
It has been this ill informed rhetoric from hundred’s of years ago and now, delieved for Irish Americans that led to
them funding I.R.A terrorism.