Obama's embarrassment
By MICHAEL BARONE, New York Post
PRESIDENT Obama, who found time to go on a 24-hour jaunt to Copenhagen on Oct. 2 to seek the 2016 Olympic Games for Chicago, apparently can't find the time for a 24-hour trip to Berlin on Nov. 9 for a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Well, we all have our priorities, and the president can't be everywhere at once, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will surely represent America ably in Berlin. Still, it seemed an odd decision to me -- until I went back and got the speech that candidate Obama delivered on July 24, 2008, to a crowd of 200,000 in the Tiergarten in Berlin.
As I reread the text, it struck me that there would be an embarrassing contrast between what Obama said in Berlin 15 months ago and many policies he has been pursuing as president. Some conservatives were irritated that Obama introduced himself at the Tiergarten as "a fellow citizen of the world."
But before that, he declared himself "a proud citizen of the United States," and of his 46 paragraphs only one was devoted to an apology for America's misdeeds, "our share of mistakes," "times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions."
Quite a contrast here from the more profuse apologies he has made abroad this year. Obama, in seven stirring paragraphs, also recounted America's airlift of food and fuel to Berlin
when the Soviets cut off land access in 1948.
True, at one point he suggested that the Berlin Wall came down because "there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."
But he also spoke of "the bullet holes in the buildings and the somber stones and pillars near the Brandenburg Gate," evidence of Soviet oppression.
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