Obama trip addressed global constituency

LONDON - The talk of French intellectuals and Iraqi policy makers, Israeli settlers and British broadcasters, "Obama" dominated the world's tongues and its simple, percussive syllables sounded at home rolling off each of them.

Yet during his eight-day, eight-country tour through the Middle East and Europe that ended yesterday, Senator Barack Obama, whose presidential candidacy has generated not only curiosity abroad but something of a global constituency, has come to represent different things across languages, cultures, and national borders.

The personality-driven politics that won him adoration from many in Europe brought more skepticism in the Middle East, where people look to politics less for idealism than realism. Just about everywhere, the American newcomer was cast as a perfect foil for President Bush.

"This is a question of people not liking the president and not hating America," said Tyler Brûlé, the Canadian-born editor in chief of "Monocle," a London-based magazine on international affairs. "You see Obama and you see America as a young country. Isn't it about bloody time it has young and diverse leadership?"

But Obama's warm reception abroad has met with some criticism back home, prompting him yesterday to defend the tour. "The reason that I thought this trip was important is that I am convinced that many issues that we face at home are not going to be solved as effectively unless we have strong partners abroad," he told reporters outside Prime Minister Gordon Brown's official residence at 10 Downing Street.

Obama pointed out that McCain had urged him to take the trip, and that McCain completed a similar tour in March. "So it doesn't strike me that we have done anything different than the McCain campaign has done, which is to recognize that part of the job of the next president, commander in chief, is to forge effective relationships with our allies."

On Thursday, Obama embraced his worldwide constituency with much the same words and themes as he does with his domestic supporters, inviting them to a large-scale, open-air rally in Berlin.

"People of the world," Obama said at the city's Victory Column to an estimated 200,000 people, including one person who held a sign endorsing "Barack for Kanzler," or chancellor. "This is our moment. This is our time."

Obama used the address to call for an era of reinvigorated internationalism, with an emphasis on aggressive diplomacy. He distanced himself from Bush administration policies unpopular abroad, criticizing the war in Iraq and the use of torture on detainees and demanding a more aggressive approach to global warming.

Introducing himself as a "fellow citizen of the world," Obama's posture, too, marked a strong contrast with Bush's style, which was criticized abroad as indifferent to international public opinion and at times hostile towards multilateral institutions.

"He represents the idea of change, and I think a lot of people in Germany and Berlin and Europe want a change in the foreign policy of America," Mayor Klaus Wowereit of Berlin said in an interview.

"It's a new face, and charismatic, and that's important," said Wowereit, a socialist seen as a possible contender for German federal office. He announced during his 2006 campaign that he was gay and has since become a symbol for a type of photogenic, personality-driven politics on a continent where politics has traditionally been defined along party and class lines.

In Europe, Obama's candidacy has become a model - preaching domestic reform and international cooperation - emulated by some on the left and right. As a mixed-race man with an immigrant background seeking to lead a largely white country, he seemed to some to represent the rise of a new, postcolonial order.

"We are fascinated by him: He is charismatic, he is intelligent, he has ideas," Bernhard Borsche, a 29-year old law-firm trainee, said of Obama. Borsche took a three-hour bus ride from Hamburg to meet six friends from elsewhere in Germany to see Obama, passing the time until his speech began with two large, plastic bottles of convenience-store sangria.

"Normally we don't care much about politics there, but after Obama we are kind of hopeful that there will be change and that it will transfer to German politics," Borsche said.

The idea that his approach to American politics could be reproduced elsewhere - and perhaps some of his popularity borrowed - appeared to be on the minds of some of the heads of state, government ministers, and prominent opposition leaders who met with Obama on his trip.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France even stood alongside the presumptive Democratic nominee for a joint news conference at Elysee, the presidential palace - a protocol usually reserved for heads of state and one denied when Senator John McCain visited in Paris in March after he clinched his party's nomination.

David Cameron, the youthful British Conservative leader who met with Obama yesterday and presented him with gifts, including a Winston Churchill book and compact discs by Radiohead and Gorillaz, has long invoked him as a model for his efforts to modernize the party that has been out of power for more than a decade.

Cameron, an early favorite to become Britain's next prime minister, now regularly indicts a "broken politics" in Britain and appeals for a "change in Westminster" in his speeches - earning him both a wide base of support in polls and, like Obama, criticism for thriving on vague rhetoric.

"Like Barack Obama in the States, there is enough Prozac in the Cameron clichés to keep the party going. But what do they even mean?" asked columnist Douglas Murray in the British center-right political magazine "Standpoint."

The Obama sensibility has not shown an ability to translate easily into domestic politics in Europe. Walter Veltroni, former mayor of Rome who wrote the introduction to an Italian edition of Obama's most recent book, lost a campaign for prime minister this spring that relied heavily on Obama for inspiration, including a similar approach to organizing supporters online and the use of "Si puo fare," Italian for "Yes we can," as a slogan.

Nearly everywhere, Obama's origins are used to distinguish him not only from other American politicians but also domestic political leaders, and are central to the high expectations Europeans have for him.

"He can be a new Martin Luther King, who shows you can achieve goals before violence," said Frank Reeber, a 46-year old German systems manager who attended the Berlin rally.

Unlike the American media, which often identifies Obama as a candidate to be the country's first black president, European coverage tends to describe him as mixed-race. One German television channel, while rapturously recounting Obama's biography - "Obama Superman?" a narrator mused - repeatedly used the term "multi-culti" to describe his background.

"I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable," Obama said in Berlin. He mentioned that his grandfather had been a domestic servant to the British colonial regime in Kenya, a biographical point rarely made to American audiences but one that in Europe tied him to a familiar immigrant path from the periphery of empire to its center.

"Not everyone here is called Sarkozy," said the French president, whose parents were Hungarian and Greek-Jewish immigrants, picking up the theme on Friday. "I'm fully aware not everyone is called Obama in the United States. And the adventure of Barack Obama, it is a story which speaks to the heart of French people and speaks to the heart of Europeans."

Yet the affection for such a story is largely abstract; few European countries have demonstrated as warm a welcome to political figures from their own ethnic and racial minorities as they did to Obama.

No Turkish politician in Germany or Anglo-Indian or Afro-Caribbean in Great Britain has come as far as Obama. None of the 577 members of France's National Assembly claims a heritage among the Muslim North African nations that the French refer to collectively as the Maghreb, source of as much as one-tenth of the country's population.

"I don't think anyone seriously thinks there's even a remote prospect of a Maghrebi being elected president in France, but there is a feeling that if Obama enters the White House this will make it harder for political elites in France to convincingly claim that they are doing enough to provide equal opportunities for minorities," said Alec G. Hargreaves, director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University.

In the Middle East, where Obama began his trip, the senator's complex relationship to Islam - his father was raised as a Muslim but became agnostic, and Obama became a Christian as an adult but chose to identify proudly with his Arabic name - have made him an object of wariness by Arabs and Jews.

Above all, it may be the urgent nature of politics in a region perpetually facing possible war - where American leaders are closely monitored by all sides for suggestions of misguided loyalties - that makes those in the Middle East most resistant to the romance surrounding Obama's campaign.

His sessions in Israeli and Palestinian capitals focused on specific territorial and security issues, and only one of the officials with whom he met spoke of Obama's ability to inspire. "I was moved as a human man, a human being, and what we need is moving humanity in our time to overcome the problems to raise hope," said President Shimon Peres of Israel.

Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.