Europe gave him their hearts when he visited last summer and all over the world he is admired and adored. But the question that was hanging over Europe at the beginning of this week was how much more they'll give Barack Obama as he returns for the first time as president of the United States- Michelle and Barack Obama; The making of modern day Superstars
Yet Obama also headed into his first overseas trip with grand goals looking to forge a coordinated global response to the economic crisis, hoping Europe will send more of its sons and daughters to help in an escalating war in Afghanistan, and seeking to restore international cooperation that he thinks suffered in the Bush years.
Europe trip will test Obama's star power - by Steven Thomma – McClatchy
Thomas wrote before the trip that Obama would have a tough- 'Publicly, European and world leaders will embrace Obama. But privately, they likely will say no to some of his requests, most notably sending combat troops to Afghanistan, or simply avoid the subject'.
"He remains a superstar in European public opinion," said Reginald Dale, a scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist research organization. Dale noted that Europeans have even more trust in Obama than Americans do, according to a recent poll by the Financial Times of London.
"European leaders want to be seen next to Obama, preferably with his arms around their shoulders and a big smile, because he's so popular in Europe. And nobody's going to try and raise awkward subjects with him."
Perhaps, but those subjects will be unavoidable as Obama heads first to Great Britain, then on to France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Turkey.
Great Britain
His first stop was at the G-20, a group of 19 major economic powers, plus the European Union, meeting in London. Obama already had been pushing them for more government spending to stimulate the global economy, as he's doing at home. Many European countries, however, instead are emphasizing tougher regulation of the financial system.
There was significant trans-Atlantic divide before the G-20 between the U.S. position of massive stimulus spending and European opposition to that." Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic, the current EU president, last week ripped Obama's free spending approach as a "road to hell."
France and Germany
Obama attended a meeting of NATO in Strasbourg, France, and Baden-Baden, Germany. Officially, the meeting marked the 60th anniversary of the alliance. Unofficially, the war in Afghanistan will dominate the meeting as the U.S. asks for help.
People believed that “President Obama will probably not have much luck in obtaining additional combat forces," said Stephen Flanagan, a scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. "There just isn't the willingness on the part of most of the European allies to do that right now."
Czech Republic
In Prague, Obama will attend a meeting of the EU. One likely topic will be the U.S. commitment to deploy a missile defense system in the Czech Republic, as the Bush administration proposed.
Ostensibly aimed at protecting against missile launches from Iran, the system also is seen as a defense against Russia but Moscow sees it as an insult and a threat.
"If Obama withdraws on missile defense, which he seems to be doing, then he is going to leave the Czech and Polish governments out there hanging in the wind," said Dale of CSIS. "They went to great lengths to reach agreement on basing those facilities there, even though their public opinions were largely against it."
Turkey
Obama will visit Ankara and Istanbul before going home. Though this isn't the site of
Obama's promised speech reaching out to the Muslim world, but that will come later Turkey is a Muslim country.
"Obama will start with a great advantage when he gets to Turkey, because his name is not George Bush. He (Bush) was extremely unpopular in Turkey, as well as in the Islamic world," said Bulent Aliriza, the director of the Turkey Project at CSIS.
Also, Obama will be pressed to speak out on whether Turkey committed genocide against Armenians from 1915 to 1923. Armenians want the recognition; Turkey maintains the dead were victims of war, not genocide. As a candidate, Obama promised the recognition as he sought Armenian-American support. But as president, he needs Turkish support, for the war in Afghanistan and other issues.
So how have Obama fared so far? Res Ipsa Loquitor! Let the facts speak for itself:
President Barack Obama gets lavish Ceremonial Welcome to France from Sarkovy – Daily Telegraph
michelle and Barack Obama
The visit was much watched, especially for the encounter between their wives, Carla and Michelle, who were to share a sumptuous lunch prepared by a two-star chef while the presidents met.
Mr Sarkozy rolled out all the pomp possible, with a red carpet arrival with full military honors from a company of soldiers unsually dressed in camouflage at the majestic 18th-century Rohan Palace, once home to the bishops of Alsace. Mr Obama was mobbed by cheering crowds after arriving in France on Friday for a NATO summit, where he hopes to secure backing for his new strategy over Afghanistan.
The US president helped broker a deal at a G20 summit in London on Thursday to tackle the global financial crisis and will be hoping for a similarly broad accord at the two-day NATO summit on how to turn the tide against the worsening Afghan crisis.
"He will talk about a strong partnership with Europe, but in that partnership there have to be mutual responsibilities," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters travelling with the U.S. president from Britain to France. "We have to understand there are real threats out there in the world."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner also were present, as was Sarkozy's special envoy for Afghanistan, a sign that the conflict there would also likely come up for discussion.
France has signaled it would be willing to increase humanitarian aid but would not send more soldiers. Church bells pealed at the stroke of noon from the nearby Strasbourg cathedral, while helicopters helping ensure security droned overhead.
The French leader is eager for his own time with Obama to press his ideas on European defense, NATO's relationship with Russia, alliance expansion and other major international security issues. On the menu for the first ladies, Guineau Fowl stuffed with foie gras and Coquilles St. Jacques and the famed green asparagus, a specialty that is highly prized in spring in this region.
Mr Obama was to travel later in the day across the Rhine river into Germany where he will meet in the spa town of Baden-Baden with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is co-hosting the NATO summit with Sarkozy.
Michelle and Barack Obama
America lauds British admiration for Michelle and Barack Obama – Washington Times
From the warm words the US president showered on Gordon Brown, to the adulation shown by the British public to the first couple and that already famous touchy moment between Michelle Obama and the Queen, the special relationship – feared to be in peril just a few weeks ago – is looking as sunny as the weather that greeted the Americans.
Amid wall to wall cable news coverage of the G20, and reams of newsprint devoted to the visit, London, its people and their monarch came across exceedingly well. Even Wednesday's demonstrations, which could have marred the summit, caused some bemused questioning of the protesters' motives, but more than anything served to demonstrate the effectiveness of British policing.
Nile Gardiner, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher now based at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, spent much of the week being interviewed by US television stations about the trip.His impression was that "Britain came across in an extremely positive light". "It was a demonstration of British hospitality at its very best," he said.
"There was recognition that the Brits are experts at these diplomatic receptions."There was a collective intake of breath after Mrs Obama put her arm around the Queen at the Buckingham Palace reception.
An avalanche of tabloid disapproval lambasting rude Americans was expected, but did not arrive."So high is the adulation that has been heaped on the Obamas from the normally caustic British press since their arrival that newspapers here said it was a sign of how well Mrs Obama got along with the Queen," wrote Helene Cooper of the New York Times, who travelled with the presidential entourage.
Americans were been almost taken aback by the rock star welcome given to the Obamas. At home, the dark clouds hanging over the economy were beginning to overshadow the new president's popularity, though he has been in office for less than three months.
But Mr Obama's stellar reception in the country still closer to more Americans than any other has reminded his compatriots that their leader is supremely popular overseas. Furthermore his wife has now established herself as an international star.
"The Queen's been on the world stage for more than five decades; Michelle Obama for about five minutes – but all of them quite dazzling," wrote Chris Hampson, NBC News director of international news.On the political front, no one could deny Mr Obama's claim that the summit was a success.
"Clearly a day does not make a presidency," the veteran Democratic strategist James Carville wrote on his CNN blog. "But if President Obama has more like April 2, 2009, he'll be able to govern much more like a statesman than a politician."
He wins an award!
The US President triumphed in the Biography of the Year category for the memoir of his early life and African-American heritage. The book beat works by television presenter Paul O'Grady, actress Julie Walters and comedienne Dawn French to take the prize.
Mr Obama, who visited Britain this week for the first time since becoming president, was unable to collect his trophy at the ceremony in London, having travelled to Strasbourg for the Nato summit. Announced Mr Obama's prize, comedienne Jo Brand said: "Incredible as it may seem, but Barack Obama cannot be with us tonight."
The president was beaten to a second award by journalist Aravind Adiga, who was crowned Author of the Year for his Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger. Mr Obama's political thesis, The Audacity of Hope, had been nominated for the prize.
The shortlist in that category was crammed with winners of other literary gongs including Orange prize-winner Rose Tremain, Costa Book of the Year winner Sebastian Barry and Costa Biography Laureate Diana Athill.
michelle and Barack Obama
Michelle Obama, the birth of a very moder superstar; Bonnie Greer- Daily Telegraph
Over the past week Michelle Obama has eclipsed everyone, including her husband. A fellow Chicagoan celebrates the emergence of an icon
It is well known in the environs of my native Southside of Chicago, the same area in which Michelle Obama was born and raised, that it is she who is the Power and her husband who is the Glory.
For it was Michelle who took the rather exotically, for Americans, Kenyan bred and reared Barack Obama and made him into the genuine article – complete with the proper accent, choice of sport, and correct approach to the problems of the day.
To say that he would not be where he is today without her may be overstating the case, but imagine him with a typical American politico's wife: iron-hair, rigid expression, cookie-cutting tendencies, and you can see what I mean.
Michelle is from a different world and there is simply no chance of that. Southsiders are largely descended from the great migration after the First World War, when the children of slaves made the move away from the peonage of sharecropping into industrial powerhouses like Chicago. Too often people fled from lynchings and house-burnings, and the evil spell of one neighbour towards another.
The railroad was their chariot of fire and a decent day's work was the main goal in life. These people – my ancestors and Michelle's – existed in a city which Martin Luther King once called the most segregated in America. Even as recently as the late 1960s, black kids were being bussed amid murderous hostility to school – schools which they were constitutionally entitled to attend, but could not by local law and tradition.
The very act of stepping out of your front door in the wrong neighbourhood could get you killed. Everyone knows this to be true and you live accordingly. Almost every family has a brother or father or uncle or male cousin who has been involved with the criminal justice system, whether guilty or not.
Michelle once said in response to whether she was afraid that her husband would be assassinated: "Barack is a black man. He could get killed going to the gas station." That is the ordinary – and extraordinary, in the case of Barack Obama – black man's lot.
But Michelle, while quietly determined to be as ordinary a wife and mother as she can be in her new incarnation, is no ordinary woman. We saw that this week when she met the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh; clearly, they found her presence electrifying. The Duke of Edinburgh was reduced to nervous giggles.
The Queen, clearly magnetised by this woman who has metamorphosed before our very eyes into a global phenomenon, put her arm around Michelle. Michelle, so natural and charming and warm, was quick to reciprocate. Here is a woman not afraid of touch, a woman whose easy physicality we have already seen with her children and her husband.
Here is a woman who knows how to communicate, not just with words but with her body language. The last time we saw these qualities so dazzlingly embodied was in the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
We were reminded of them again when Michelle visited the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington, north London. "I do hugs," she said, after she had thrilled 100 schoolgirls with her motivational speech and effortlessly embraced them.
The girls erupted in squeals, high-fives and tears. She told them that "being smart is cooler than anything in the world". What are the chances of those children getting that message? High. That's because she spoke from the heart, not from a script. But it is her silence that has also amplified her star status.
The moment she stepped off Air Force One is preserved in our collective memory: it was like a clip from a movie. She and the husband she has supported and nurtured and expected the best of looked like movie stars, but of a singularly fresh model. They are stars with substance. They have both emerged triumphant from a script that once would have written them out. This puts the comparison, much quoted this week, with Diana, the late Princess of Wales in its proper proportion.
On the surface it seems apt, but on closer inspection it is easy to see where it does not apply. Diana was the product of centuries of aristocracy, the granddaughter and daughter of courtiers. She was born on the royal estate at Sandringham, and her attempts to make the monarchy more in tune with the latter half of the 20th century, and more importantly with her own sons, were a constant effort that had to be cultivated every day.
While Diana's compassion and affability were natural to her, the world in which she attempted to move could not contain her gifts. On the Southside, the ability to mix compassion, warmth and a gritty hard-headedness are what are required.
In fact they are the only ways to survive. Michelle took Barack to her church and to her people, and showed him that survival meant knowing how to use all the qualities of those former pickers of cotton that had been given to her with her mother's milk.
The black Southside of Chicago in Michelle's time was about stay-at-home moms who could bring up daughters whose eyes were set on Harvard and a career, and working-class fathers who took the time after work to read from encyclopaedias to their girls because, in the fight for equality, it was all hands on deck.
This has given Michelle a no-nonsense detector which I suspect the Queen picked up on immediately and endeared the new First Lady to her. No surprises, then, that they took to one another; the Queen, no doubt having been in the presence of myriads of phoneys during her reign, is herself armed with a radar detector second to none. For dark-skinned women, especially black women, the fact that Michelle Obama will become one of the most photographed women in the world is a gift beyond measure.
She erases in an instant the notion of blondeness as supreme beauty icon, a notion which plagues all women, blonde and non-blonde. She is neither supermodel, nor librarian, trophy wife nor co-partner in her husband's presidency. She is a mother who has taught her daughters to eat healthier food than she does.
She is an executive who asked her husband when he was going to start to earn some decent money because she was tired of being the chief breadwinner. She is a daughter who brought her mother, a descendant of slaves, too, into the great White House that slaves had built. Dressing her girls like proper Southside little black girls, she has brought innocence and demureness back to a world in which eight-year-old girls wear T-shirts that read: "Too Many Boys, So Little Time".
But it was at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school, where she spoke on Thursday, that gave us the measure of the woman. As she squatted and kissed and shook hands with the screaming hordes of young women who came rushing to greet her to show their love and admiration, there was no doubt in my mind that any one of them could be a future prime minister.
Put aside the lachrymose sentimentality that follows the Obamas like the plague and listen to what she said that day: "Nothing in my background would lead me to believe that I would be standing before you today." Take that as read because it is true. Michelle Obama is many things, but above all she is a genuine blues queen.
I'm not talking about the often morose blues of male singers such as Robert Johnson and the millions called "Sonny Boy", but the joyous, down-to-earth, look-life-in-the-eye-and–tell-it-like-it-is blues of Bessie Smith, Big Mamma Thornton and Ethel Waters. In her every move, gesture and inflection, she shows us that she is their daughter. And like them, her feet are on the earth, and her eye is on the sparrow.
Republicans at home were already mocking Barack Obama for a speech he gave in France condemning Americans arrogance to wards Europe; they claimed he spoke against America just to get them to commit more troops to Afghanistan. But they said he spoke for nothing and will come home empty handed.
But what happened?
Barack Obama persuades Nato allies to send more troops - Daily Telegraph
Barack Obama has succeeded in persuading key European Nato allies to commit extra troops to help win the war in Afghanistan.Diplomats close to Nato summit negotiations in Strasbourg have hailed "good progress" following passionate appeals for increased troops by President Obama.
The new military commitments could amount to thousands of extra troops, providing a summer surge in Afghanistan and boosting security for elections this August.President Sarkozy stressed support for the Obama administration's new strategy on Afghanistan ahead of the talks.
Mr Obama, whose first visit to Europe as president has drawn cheering crowds, told Nato leaders that "Europe should not simply expect the US to shoulder that burden alone. "The more capability we see here in Europe, the happier the US will be, the more effective we will be in coordinating our activities," he said on Fri.
Mr Obama's plan for an Afghanistan surge will increase the number of US troops in country from 38,000 to 68,000 over the next eight months.
Associated Press – President Barack Obama heralded what he called "concrete commitments" from NATO allies on Afghanistan, saying their agreement to send up to 5,000 more military trainers and police was "a strong down payment" toward securing the country.
"I am pleased that our NATO allies pledged their strong and unanimous support for our new strategy," Obama said at the end of a summit heavily focused on his newly retooled strategy focused on quashing terrorist threats in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan."We've started to match real resources to achieve our goals," he said.
Turkey said Obama was essential to negotiations that overcame its objections to Fogh Rasmussen and ended with all 28 NATO leaders unanimously approving the Danish Prime Minister as the new civilian leader of the alliance. Thus, Just as Obama was instrumental to China and France reaching an accord in London, thus facilitating an agreement at the G20 summit, Obama achieved the same feat in France with Turkey; Just by adopting a humble but smart power.
Res Ipsa Loquitor! Like the Igbo would say- Obama na agbo ihe ewu n'eri!
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
