Grand President of the World

Obama’s “Grand President of the World” speech fell flat. In fact, parts of it were downright embarrassing, perhaps prompted by the need to score another historic “first.” It began with B. Hussein’s embarrassing claim at the outset that “I know that I don’t look like the Americans (wearing his ‘blackness’ openly) who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”

Never to be bothered by pesky little facts that may get in the way of self-congratulation, it seems to have escaped His Omnipotence that two distinguished blacks have served as secretary of State, representing the U.S. at the highest diplomatic level in Europe and around the world for the past seven years.

As always, there’s no lack of self-regard: “Now the world will watch and remember what we do here — what we do with this moment.” But there’s a complete absence of irony in a phrase that unconsciously recalls Lincoln’s modest prediction that “the world will little note or long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they” — the honored dead — “did here.”

It does not help that Obama can’t quite make up his mind about walls, the metaphor meant to hold the speech together. “The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope,” Obama rightly says. “But that very closeness,” Obama goes on to say in the next sentence, “has given rise to new dangers — dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean.”

But wait. This unwalled, borderless world where transnational threats abound is now threatened by — you guessed it — new walls? And these new walls in turn cut off the ties that bind, while “the burdens of global citizenship” — (Barf Alert) — “continue to bind us together.” Obama thus concludes: “That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.”

By now most American uncouth rubes, such as yours truly, are probably wondering what happened to the sound adage that good fences make good neighbors?

The result is an intellectual shipwreck.

The upshot is that this speech was an another judgment call that Obama got wrong. No one forced him to give the first-ever presidential campaign speech before a mass audience of non-voters overseas. And he can’t say he wasn’t warned, considering these pointed remarks from the German chancellor’s spokesman:

It’s unusual to hold election rallies abroad. No German candidate for high office would even think of using the National Mall (in Washington) or Red Square in Moscow for a rally because it would not be seen as appropriate.

In case the freshman (inexperienced) Illinois senator missed the point, the chancellor herself later added: “If the candidate — or any other candidate is elected, then (he) is welcome to speak as president before the Brandenburg Gate.” Even some American reporters, heretofore Barry Hussein's biggest boosters, raised the same concerns about a premature victory lap, as evinced in this Politico item:

“It is not going to be a political speech,” said a senior foreign policy adviser, who spoke to reporters on background. “When the president of the United States goes and gives a speech, it is not a political speech or a political rally.

“But he is not president of the United States,” a reporter reminded the adviser.

Indeed, but does the presumptuous Barack Hussein Obama realize this?