Europe’s dream America

We are dreaming, we Europeans, of Obamaland: a temperate land of sunshine and showers, of soft music and plenitude, of conciliation and concord. We think we caught glimpses of it in July, just fleetingly, behind the garden wall at Number 10; on the steps of the Elysée Palace, and beneath the Victory monument in Berlin, where the would-be US president finally spoke to us, before being whisked away again. And we concealed our very slight disappointment — that he seemed so camera-shy; that even in Berlin he could not quite treat us to the same soaring rhetoric that he lavished on his fellow-citizens; that he still seemed locked in the “war on terror”. But we gave him the benefit of the doubt… Unless the polls are very wrong, Obamaland is materialising almost as you read. And, as we anticipate the long transition before Inauguration Day, our wish-list is almost complete. From a president who had barely travelled outside the US before taking office, we look forward to one whose peripatetic youth surely makes him a citizen of the world. From a president who believed US military superiority was there to be used, we welcome one whose stated preference is for talking first — even to adversaries — and calling in the force of arms only as the last resort.

And we especially welcome someone who, even as he regrets his lack of a foreign language, seems… to want to master fluent European. When the worst the Republicans can find to throw at him is to denounce his economic remedies as “socialist”, is it not time to roll out the red carpet? Europe’s leaders might already be jockeying for the privilege of being first to greet the new president, but the code of Obamaland would remove the need for such undignified scrambling. The new president would be the one to hop on the plane for a lightning tour of European capitals… Barack Obama has only himself to blame if he has spun dreams. Yet all that is certain as Americans vote today is that Obamaland, if indeed it emerges from the ocean mists overnight, will not be as we imagine it.

From a comment by Mary Dejevsky in ‘The Independent’