The contrast could not be starker between the images of Barack Obama and John McCain this week as we move on to Paris from Berlin Germany, chronicling the young Senator’s history making trip abroad. Drawing an estimated two hundred thousand adoring Germans to hear the best America has produced in many years speak, was a sight to behold.
Watching the throngs of Germans cheering Obama’s emotional appeal to strengthen the ties between us all and tear down the walls that separate us struck a nerve, a sentiment, and a resurgence of pride in the American spirit that this writer has been deprived of for quite some time. Seeing the American flag being proudly waved on foreign soil and not being burned and dragged in the streets with our nation’s leader being hung in effigy was also a tremendous change for the better.
Witnessing a surprisingly diverse audience of races and cultures presumably filled with the curious as much as the hopeful, we could sense a feeling of goodwill welling up for an America that had let them down over the last eight years. With precise language and his usual par excellence delivery, Barack Obama touched their hearts and minds in a way that will begin the healing between our country and their Union. We found it amazing to see how one speech could go so far to repair the damage done to our western alliances.
Perhaps it was Obama’s race considering the track record of America’s race relations that Europe is marveling over. Perhaps it was Obama’s background that wowed the crowds. Perhaps it was as simple as Obama being the fresh new approach the world has been waiting for that captured their imaginations. While we can’t say for sure what his appeal is and why it is so broad and wide, we can say with a high degree of certainty that John McCain could not have come close to what Barack Obama achieved on this trip this week.
Conversely John McCain and his campaign spent the week bitching about Obama being arrogant to act like the president before the votes are cast, stirring up controversy for not getting equal press coverage and Bark Obama’s refusal to admit “the surge” resulted in positive conditions on the ground in Iraq. In reality, John McCain is just plain boring. Even his handlers must be secretly cringing when Senator McCain tries to speak. But in John McCain’s defense, he is hardly being served well by his campaign management as they had his visuals in the back of a supermarket cutting cheese and bad jokes while Barack Obama is seen conversing with the world’s multitudes.
Alas, even granting McCain the consideration of his campaign management team being second tier in quality, that fact of the matter remains that Senator McCain is so dated, he couldn’t draw two hundred thousand flies if he was smothered in sh*t on a hot summer’s day in Arizona. The thought of John McCain, the personification of an antique rising to Obama’s European vacation occasion is both laughable and sad at the same time.