Übermensch Comes to the Übermart

BERLIN -- Barack Obama's insistence that reporters "tamp down expectations" for his nighttime speech here on trans-Atlantic relations -- delivered earlier in the day on his plane en route from Jerusalem -- came far too late.

"Berlin has high expectations for Obama," Der Tagesspiegel reported on its front today. “Ich bin ein Kennedy,” Das Zeit quipped, with the type of front-page irony that the Chicago crowd has recently made clear it does not find funny. “Obama Superman?” asked a German TV network, during its wall-to-wall day-long coverage of speech preparations.

Hours before Obama was set to take the stage at the Victory Column, crowds were already streaming through the Tiergarten park to the site. Many of them had been drawn to the location by Bauhaus-styled postcards promoting the event which Obama staff had stacked at local cafes and handed out to pedestrians.

At the site of Checkpoint Charlie, where the Berlin Wall once separated east from west, two teenage women dressed in Army uniforms for pictures with curious tourists -- one euro per photo op -- were joined by a stars-and-stripes "Yes, We Can" placard their boss had propped between them that morning.

"Many people say Obama is very special, because he is young,' said one of them, Julia Kühn, a 17-year old student for whom playing soldier was a summer job.

A few blocks away, Benjamin Lyllhoff, a 31-year old self-described "revolutionary," was manning a literature table for Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität, the German offshoot of Lyndon LaRouche’s organization. The most freshly scrawled sign carried a big picture of Obama, addressing the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, with a caption suggesting that his campaign was funded by "Nazi collaborator" George Soros, the financier who gives generously to Democratic causes.

Obama joined LaRouche's pantheon of global-finance villains just a week ago. "All the time we have new signs because there are always new things happening," said Lyllhoff.

Obama was going to receive his party's nomination because "the Democratic National Committee’s under the control of the British Empire," Lyllhoff explained. "The reason they're promoting him is to get rid of Hillary because she was the one attacking the Wall Street bankers, like Roosevelt did."

He added that "a lot of the promotion for Obama has been because of the faith-based initiatives supported by Wall Street bankers. It was Karl Rove's idea to get money designated into the black communities whose priests go for Obama. And you have the media, who are mostly run from London, and you have the Al Gore movement. Al Gore is really a British agent," Lyllhoff went on, tying Gore's concern about global warming to population-control policies to ideas about eugenics that propelled the rise of Nazism.

Why were so many other Germans falling for Obama, then? "We're being dumbed down. People don't understand history, so they don't question it when they see someone like Obama, who has a nice smile and says the right things," Lyllhoff said.

Then Lyllhoff said that he would be attending the speech, too.