Ich bin ein Obaman

We already know that Barack Obama can be many things to many people, but could anyone have guessed that he would also be a good German?

In honor of the Democratic candidate’s visit to Berlin last week, Die Zeit, the Hamburg-based weekly, revealed for the first time that the Illinois senator’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was an upstanding Alsatian farmer named Christian Gutknecht, who shoved off to America on Sept. 13, 1749. The article was titled “The German Obama.”

And not only was the German press trying to claim Obama for their own last week, they were wishing and hoping that more of their leaders would be more like him. On the morning the Democratic presidential candidate arrived in Berlin, the sensational conservative tabloid Bild ran a hilarious feature titled, “Make us an Obama,” which featured head shots of five German politicians morphed into a picture of Obama. These new Obamaized German politicians had remade names: Angela Omerkel, for example, under a strangely compelling version of the German chancellor crossed with Obama and notably sporting his short, short, short haircut.

The rest of the paper’s coverage was breathless. “Why does the black Obama excite us so much?” asked one headline. The answer: “In his words, we hear a better future. In his aura, we see a glorious, righteous America. Hope is in his eyes. ... He is young! . . . . He is multiculti and modest! . . . . He doesn’t talk, he preaches! . . . . He stands for freedom! . . . . He’s not Bush! . . . . Welcome, Mr. Hope!”

It’s one thing for Americans to get all hot and bothered about Obama, but it’s another to see famously sober Germans get all wound up about a foreign presidential candidate. Obama came to Germany just to strike a presidential pose, and as many as 200,000 Berliners were willing to serve as unpaid extras in what was essentially a political advertisement.

On one level, Obama’s popularity in Germany has everything to do with George W. Bush’s failed presidency and the transatlantic tensions caused by the Iraq war. But on another, it has everything to do with the decline in German political culture.

“This is a German problem,” said Wolfgang Nowak, a former high-level advisor to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. “The sad news is that no single German politician could get one-tenth of Obama’s audience. He’s telling us that politics can be different. It doesn’t have to be dirty, that we can all work together.”

Nowak says he was the first person to tell Chancellor Angela Merkel that Obama would be the next U.S. president. “It’s like he was out of an American movie,” Nowak told me. “And we Berliners are raised to expect Americans [like Obama] to arrive in times of crisis.”

But what sells in Berlin won’t necessarily sell in the American heartland. Yes, Obama appeared presidential. His speech was fluid, safe and filled with soaring rhetoric. Even as he acknowledged America’s imperfections, he also reasserted its greatness and its self-imposed role as a light unto nations. By all accounts, his speech was well received. But could too much enthusiasm from those weak, latte-sipping Euros present a problem stateside?

According to German Marshall Fund Senior Director Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, for all their familiarity with American culture, Germans are fundamentally at odds with mainstream U.S. views. “Basically, Germans like everything about the U.S. that Middle America revolts against. They love elitist America, Harvard, the East Coast, the cultured and the mannered. They don’t understand the swagger and the cutting of the underbrush. Obama is not only the anti-Bush, he has the liberal, elitist feel that Germans like.”

Particularly among American conservatives, there’s been a lot of overblown talk these days about German anti-Americanism. They point to a 2008 Pew Survey that found 34% of Germans don’t like Americans at all or in part, and 61% see the U.S. as heading for a landing on the ash heap of history. But Germany’s case of Obamamania suggests another story line: that Germans are desperate to like America again and that the Democratic candidate has given them an excuse to come out of the closet. Or maybe he reminds them of their desire to have someone heroic of their own.

But appreciating American idealism and rejoicing in the exercise of American power are two different things. And although he may have sounded like it Thursday, Obama is not running for president of the world. If elected, he’ll likely toe lines that Europeans would want him to leap across. Do we really believe his German fans know the details of Obama’s stance on the death penalty, the 2nd Amendment, or recognize his growing comfort in discussing the use of military power?

Temporarily blinded by his rock-star appeal, Germans are forgetting that, as leader of a nation so culturally distinct from their own, Obama will, by definition, not reflect their interests in the long term. In Europe, just as at home, Obama has raised expectations so high that he’s nearly condemned to disappoint.

And more important, does his drop-dead charisma there portend a ballot-box bust here?

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grodriguez@latimescolumnists.com