The flags were the first thing that jumped out: American flags, all over the crowd thronging in front of Berlin’s Victory Column. If the Obama campaign handed them out, it was a good idea; if Berliners brought them on their own, it was good for him. This was what you wanted to see if you were a Barack Obama staffer trying to manage the TV visuals of his speech—not people hoisting Obama signs or wearing his T-shirts, but hoisting the standard of his country. You wanted to see not just his star, but also the stripes.
As much as Obama’s world tour has been discussed as a potentially media-dominating coup, there was always a danger with the strategy, especially this speech. He couldn’t seem, as they say, like he was running for president of Europe or of the world, or like his celebrity was overshadowing his country. As important, he couldn’t seem like he was catering to the voters of other countries over his own. If the takeaway was that the rest of the world was telling Americans whom to vote for, that would not help Obama. If it was that he could get the rest of the world to embrace America, that would help. Put another way: he had to show America Europeans looking up to them, not looking down on them.
There has been some naysaying that the foreign tour could backfire on Obama (who, usual disclosure, I voted for in the primary); namely, that Americans don’t really care what them furriners think, and that the approbation of the rest of the world could make him, if anything, look suspect.
But that oversimplifies, and insults, Americans. You only have to look at U.S. pop culture to know that Americans, liberal, conservative and otherwise, like being liked by the rest of the world; that’s part of the reason that there’s such a profitable WWII nostalgia industry. People like images like the liberation of Paris, of the U.S. as benefactor and icon. Just ask the History Channel, or Tom Hanks. Yes, there may only be so many Americans who are deeply worried about feeling embarrassed on their next trip to Europe, but there are far more who feel the pull of America’s history as Europe’s friend and protector. The question is not the message but the tone.
Thus the flags. And thus Obama’s lacing the speech with references to the Berlin airlift and the fall of the Berlin wall—images that didn’t just appeal to the local audience but that bring up good feelings in Americans. From a TV image standpoint, Obama wanted to deliver an overseas speech that felt American. From that perspective, it may well have been a good thing that he was denied permission to speak at the Brandenburg Gate. Visually, that location would have emphasized the Berlin-ness of the speech; the layout of the crowd in front of him, on the other hand, looked more familiarly like a crowd in front of the Washington Monument on the National Mall—a column and long, rectangular ranks of people.
The speech was obviously going to go over well with his audience. (Occasionally too well—he probably didn’t want loud cheers when he said America hasn’t always been perfect, or German-accented “O-bam-A! O-bam-A!” chants.) How it went over in America is the unknowable, but Obama targeted his speech by talking about his father’s immigrant background (as an example of America’s universal promise) and by asking Europeans to contribute more to the effort in Afghanistan. And the section of the speech on the global reach of our major problems (Boston and Beijing alike are melting polar icecaps, a nuke designed in Pakistan could go off in Paris, etc.) seemed aimed to make the point that a speech aimed at Europe is, unavoidably, also a speech aimed at America.
Televisually, the contrast between the week for Obama and the week for John McCain has been comically uneven. Just after Obama’s speech in Berlin, CNN interviewed the Republican candidate in front of something called “The Schmidt’s Fudge Haus” in Berlin Columbus, Ohio, while wind chimes blew in the background, nearly drowning him out. Between the chimes and the Teutonic script behind him, it was like McCain was addressing the nation from a cuckoo clock.
There’s no guarantee that the asymmetry helps Obama. The McCain campaign, after all, intentionally picked its “Berlin” setting ad buy this week to position its candidate as the media underdog, the down-home American talking to real Americans (in a battleground state) while Mr. Thinks-He’s-All-That gallivants around Europe. Whether that visual message helps McCain—and more important, whether any voter manages to notice it this week—is another one of many unknowables in this battle of the Berlins.
[Updated to correct McCain’s Berlin reference—his campaign made an ad buy, not campaign visits, in American Berlins this week.]