Europe in Obama’s Reich

BERLIN: Barack Obama headed for Paris on Friday on a European tour that saw 250,000 cheering fans turn out in Berlin to hear the US presidential hopeful call for the world to tear down walls of division and hate. Before the largest crowd of his campaign, largest in Germany since the days of the Third Reich, Obama summoned Europeans and Americans together to “defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it” as surely as they conquered communism a generation ago.

Obama said that Americans and Europeans must tear down walls between estranged allies, races and faiths, in a soaring challenge to a new political generation. The Democratic White House candidate warned, not far from the footprint of the former Berlin Wall, that humanity must build “a world that stands as one,” before a rapt crowd Thursday, the biggest of his campaign.

Obama’s speech, before the Victory Column in Berlin’s famed Tiergarten park, took the White House race abroad in a way never seen before, and confirmed Obama as a global political phenomenon

It came during a Middle East and Europe tour designed to calm the fears of those Americans who fear he is too inexperienced to be president.

But despite crowd chants of Obama’s slogan “Yes, we can” and its soaring cadences, the speech was short on specifics, and Obama’s foes will likely accuse him of empty rhetoric.

McCain took a swipe at his rival, visiting a German sausage restaurant in Ohio, and said he would love to give a speech in Berlin, but only as president. His spokesman Tucker Bounds accused Obama of launching a “premature victory lap.” “John McCain has dedicated his life to serving, improving and protecting America, Barack Obama spent an afternoon talking about it.”