A few clips about Barack Obama from newspapers in Europe and the U.S..

Berliners laid on the beer, sausages and a carnival atmosphere as the city got its first proper glimpse of the man anointed by the press as “the new, black Kennedy.”

The crowd is estimated to be around 250,000.

Europe expects him to be much more Europe-aligned in his positions on multilateralism, climate change, and so on.

It is the “JFK factor” Europe would welcome pretty much any non-Republican after Bush, Obama is even more welcome.

Europeans see him as the true candidate of change and the embodiment of the famous American dream.

“Obama discovers that a Europe he has already conquered,” calls him the antithesis of Bush and reports that 84% of the French have a favorable opinion of him compared with just 33% having a favorable opinion of McCain.

Spectators started to gather in the Tiergarten park in the late morning waiting for Barack Obama to deliver an open-air speech at the Victory Column monument at 7:30 p.m., his only public address on a week-long tour.

Television crews and vendors set up around the venue and along the June 17 Avenue, while some 1,000 police officers, along with private security guards, were mobilized for the visit.

“Berlin is a symbol for the world of the victory of hope over fear, and the impossibility of dividing people in their pursuit of freedom. Let us together build on that remarkable history!” Obama wrote.

Obama, 46, is wildly popular in Europe, particularly in Germany where 76 per cent of the people would like to see him win the November election.

Barack has drawn frequent comparisons of himself with the late president John F. Kennedy, who was also 46 years old when he made his legendary “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech here in 1963.

“After all these years of George Bush, there will be better relations between the US and Europe” if Obama wins in November, said newspaper seller Klaus Schlicht, 49, speaking in former East Berlin.

“It’s a little as if Michael Jackson or some other pop star were dropping by.”

Members of Democrats Abroad and the local chapter of the Social Democrats, partners in Germany’s ruling coalition, rallied their members for the speech.

And as one veteran of Chicago black politics said to me wistfully: “He is a smart, talented and handsome person, but I am not sure which of those matters most to the American people.”

It is the camera’s power to make Obama shimmer and glow that makes him so important.

A better person might look terrible and sound worse.

How long can the great democracies survive in the face of television’s ability to make some of us look like gods when we are not?

Those who now laud him will probably be flinging abuse at him within two years of his election, and heaven knows how he will be able to continue to be the good family man he is, or walk round to the Hyde Park Hair salon for a trim and a chat with Zariff.

By becoming President he will instantly cease to be what everyone wants him to be

The chutzpah continues… Obama replaces Old Glory with
“Obama O” symbol on tail of jet

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