Obama der Hoffnunghandler

In a highly-anticipated speech in Berlin this afternoon (evening, Berlin time), Barack Obama put out a call for greater cooperation between the US and Europe, and challenged his audience to bear "the burdens of global citizenship...to protect our common security and advance our common humanity."

The speech reportedly drew a crowd of more than 200,000. That's more than double Obama's previous turnout record, an estimated 75,000 in Portland, Oregon back in May. The most notable visual: the number of Old Europeans waving American flags.

Obama invoked the 1948 Berlin air lift as a symbol of the beginnings of hope for post-war Germany, along with the dawn of the Marshall Plan and the rise of NATO (perhaps as a metaphor for the potential of a postwar Iraq?). And he echoed and broadened Ronald Reagan's famous 1987 call to tear down the Berlin wall:

[T]the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

Obama called on both Europeans and Americans to "help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East," to combat global warming, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism, and to address poverty, AIDS, and oppression worldwide. Adapting a refrain from his stump speech, he presented the crowd with a call to action: "people of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time."

-- Evie Stone

3:10 PM ET | 07-24-2008 | permalink

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