Deutschland over Obama?

First, let’s flashback to the heady days of July of 2008, when despite its remarkably small electoral collage numbers Sen. Barack Obama diverted key time and campaign resources to prop up support in what he believed was a key blue state, leading John McCain booster Lindsey Graham to quip, “We’re going to have to get to 270 without Germany”:

Well, one thing’s for sure. If you embark upon a world tour, and you decide to make a campaign speech in a foreign country in front of 200,000 Germans, and you act like you’re already president, people may notice.

And that’s what this is about: that he chose to go to Germany and do something I’ve never known a candidate to do before. You know, he orchestrated the press conference with the French president. He said something, yesterday, basically, that he embodies everything good about America. Well, you know, it’s good to have self-confidence. But you can, maybe, go too far.

The whole ad is about the idea of fame without portfolio. Paris Hilton is famous for being famous. She draws a crowd for no apparent reason. Well, I think he has, you know–in Senator Obama’s case, is the effort to be commander in chief and the leader of the free world about portfolio?

He is a celebrity, no question about it. Somebody asked me about Germany. I said, “There goes Germany. We’re going to have to get to 270 without Germany.” (LAUGHTER)

Needless to say, McCain wound up losing badly, not just in Germany, but in many of the rest of the 57 states as well last November. But today, Deutschland is no longer happy and gay, to quote from The Producers. “Oh-Oh, Obama Is Losing His German Base”, Stephen Kruiser quips, before quoting from this article in today’s Der Spiegel:

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

Orrin Judd believes that the Prussian pundits are being a mite hyperbolic, and reminds them, “C’mon — he’s never going to top his Reverend Wright speech for untruthfulness and political wiggling.” And unlike last year’s speech , it’s a bit tough for CNN to completely declare itself an Afghanistan-Free Zone, and make Obama’s troubles completely disappear.

Still though, as Jimmie Bise of the Sundries Shack tweets, “Must give the President his due. He took 100 days to write a speech that ticked off the left and the right. That’s not easy.”

And speaking of the former group, a key representative thereof is feeling more than a little ticked off himself: Tom Hayden writes in the Nation, “It’s time to strip the Obama sticker off my car.”

No word yet if fellow sixties radical Bill Ayers is feeling a mite disaffected as well these days.