As a young American living in Germany, socializing with highly educated Germans, one of the first questions I am ever asked is what I think about Obama. This is generally a set up to informing how much they love him, find him refreshing because he wants to talk to them, and that they “saw” him in Berlin.
Yet despite being highly educated and often specialists in politics or international relations, their knowledge of actual US policy or Obama’s positions on policies is very, very shallow and superficial. When I tell them, for example, that he has continued many of the Bush policies that made them despise Bush as an enemy of humanity they refuse to believe me even if there are a few articles in the German press that can confirm what I say.
If the press is turning on Obama–and I would not call it as a definite shift until we start seeing libelous Der Spiegel covers on a regular basis–it will take some time for it to trickle down into the common CW. Just as in the US, a few far leftists are intellectually and philosophically consistent, but with little effect on their watered-down compatriots. The people here are so heavily invested in Obama that only something really major would break the spell.
