The Limits of Obamamania in Europe By Victor Davis Hanson
The Bear on Oct 04 2008 at 8:20 am | Filed under: Culture, Election 08’
Beneath the popular craze are a number of significant concerns.
I recently returned from a trip this summer to the battlefields of Europe’s past—among them Waterloo, Verdun, and Normandy—and had a number of discussions with Europeans of all sorts. I can report that Obamamania is still sweeping Europe. With his youth, optimism, and charisma, Senator Barack Obama is hailed as the quintessential “good American,” a rare New Frontiersman in the mold of John F. Kennedy. Better yet, his biracial background and perceived hipness make him a glamorous 21st-century advocate of increased taxes, larger government, more entitlements, and a multinational foreign policy—all dear to the hearts of European socialists.
In Obama’s America, there will be no more of the hated George Bush’s anti-abortion, pro-gun, and twangy evangelical primordialism. The Illinois senator also sounds more antiwar than do even European statesmen. And he has surrounded himself with a number of advisers, past and present, who seem pro-Palestinian and eager to talk to Iran, Venezuela, and Syria. Perhaps a multilateral Obama presidency would restore the global clout of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
Yet a number of European elites I talked with also sounded a little worried, their unease perhaps best summarized by a pause and question: “Obama wouldn’t change things all that much, would he?” Indeed, beneath the popular Obama craze are a number of European concerns. Will his desire for “change” translate into the liberal Democratic worldview of a George McGovern or Jimmy Carter?
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