‘Yes, we can!” Germans shouted in unison with candidate Barack Obama at their Victory Column in Berlin this past summer.

To judge by the crowds and European media, most Europeans were as ecstatic about the coming of the Obama presidency as they were over the departure of George W. Bush. At last, an American president who praised multilateralism and the United Nations, and seemed sympathetic to Europe’s socialist culture.

Obama’s multiracial, nontraditional heritage seemed sophisticated and cosmopolitan in a European way that Bush’s Texas accent and Christian fundamentalism most definitely were not.

  

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