The first one, has been kinda oddly portrayed by the news media. This was summer 2007.....24 July....a Tuesday. In the midst of the campaign run.....the candidate Obama took off for Europe to do a walk-through of Landstuhl, and then landed in Berlin to deliver a major speech.
The news media talks of the 200,000 Germans that showed up that afternoon as a big deal. Most think the positive trend for President Obama in the first year or two in Europe came out of this speech.
But there's this odd thing that was necessary for the Berlin speech to work.....a rock band by the name of Reamonn was part of the opening act. The second act was a Reggae band....Patrice. The necessity of having the two bands there? This has been an odd topic which no German news source has been willing look at or ask questions.
Who sponsored the bands and stage-set-up? Unknown. That wasn't talked about to any degree.
Would the 200,000 people have shown up without the bands? Unknown. It should be noted that neither band appeals to the over-40 crowd, so there's some doubt if more than a couple thousand folks over the age of 40 showed up. There's also the odd thing about having an open-air free concert deal.....on a Tuesday, which is awful....awful.....awful rare. This kinda of thing in Germany never happens.
The 19 June 2013 speech at the Brandenburg Gate? It turned into an odd affair as well. The Berlin city government ended up making it a invited guest only situation....with a max of five thousand people allowed into the area for the speech. Beyond that....except for television coverage....it was not a significant event.
As evening fell.....I sat and watched the 19 June 2013 speech on TV and watch a rather heated and hectic event unfold. Germany was in the middle of a heatwave and the Secret Service set up some kind of unusual glass protection device in front of the President. The heat around him? I'd guess near 115 degrees.....he was sweating badly and he was rushing through the speech at a fair pace. As speeches go.....it's was a marginal two-star episode and I think the heat really screwed up the event.
Yesterday's speech in Bavaria? It was a light-weight episode and mostly geared to reassure Germans about the great US-German relationship. Marginally effective.....it was probably the last occasion that the President will be in Germany (roughly eighteen months left in office).
My general feeling is that after Bush's year in office and the negativity that existed (anti-Americanism would be a good word to use).....Germans had some fantastic opinion that President Obama was Kennedy-and-Reagan all tied into one guy. There was high expectations after the Berlin speech and the first couple of months. Then, they came to some observation that Obama was simply Bush version 2.0. Between the war episodes, the drones, the NSA affair, and a dozen other situations.....Germans have fallen back to waiting for the next guy and hoping he'll fix what Bush and Obama couldn't fix.
If it seems like I made Germans into massive skeptics.....well....yeah....that would be the perfect way to describe them currently, and how to view 2016 approaching.
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