(From the diaries -- kos)
By now, most have read of the possibility that Obama would give an address before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on July 24th. Arguably, alongside Normandy Beach, no other location in the world still holds the same symbolism for America's historical commitment to freedom and democracy.
An address there would be a historic opportunity not only to announce a new direction in foreign policy, but to demonstrate Obama's unique ability to restore America's reputation abroad.
(Obama currently leads McCain in German opinion polls by a staggering 72% to 11% --- leading with an even more staggering 86% among adults with at least a high school diploma.)
Instead, the event risks being trivialized by a domestic German political squabble, as the German government responds to political pressure from the Bush administration.
What happened?
For weeks, Klaus Scharioth, Germany's ambassador to Washington, worked to convince campaign advisers that not only must Obama visit Germany, but "that the candidate's only large European appearance should take place in Berlin."
A public event in Berlin would be the keystone of Obama's European tour, alongside, Scharioth urged, visits to Berlin landmarks such as Checkpoint Charlie (the famous Cold-War American border crossing to East Berlin), the Jewish museum or the Jewish memorial to the Holocaust, and the Brandenburg Gate.
Scharioth's efforts paid off. In a public relations coup for Germany, the Obama campaign began scouting out locations in Berlin, consulting with the city government, and considering the security situation. Berlin city officials, the mayor, and the German Foreign Ministry welcomed the idea.
But then, out of nowhere, either on July 6th or July 7th, the German Chancellor's office leaked its sudden disapproval to the press, calling into question not only the choice of the Brandenburg Gate but also whether it was appropriate at all for a candidate to campaign abroad --- even after the German ambassador's efforts to secure a public event.
The Chancellor insisted that the Brandenburg Gate has "only been used on special occasions for political events, and until now has only been offered to elected presidents."
Let's leave aside for a moment that the Dalai Lama, hardly an elected head of state, spoke to a cheering crowd of 25,000 before the Brandenburg Gate less than six weeks ago.
Leaving aside that other German political leaders, from various political parties, including the Chancellor's own center-right CDU, were puzzled and even laughed at her sudden insistence on the sacrosanctness of the Gate.
Leaving aside that the Gate is used for countless public carnivals, topless "Love Parades," and a couple weeks ago played host to 600,000 drunken sports fans watching the European soccer championship on jumbo screens.
Leaving aside that Chancellor Angela Merkel herself visited Bush in Washington in 2003 --- two and a half years before she became Chancellor. "Merkel knows," the Berlin mayor snorted today, "how to campaign in foreign countries." And: "She shouldn't throw any stones while sitting in a glass house."
Leaving all that aside, the questions remains:
Why now? What happened on July 7th?
The opening of the G-8 Summit in Japan.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (roughly the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal) reported that an irritated Bush administration staffer approached the Chancellor's foreign policy adviser Christoph Heusgen during the G-8 Summit and expressed his disapproval. The phrase used in the article is "angeblafft," or "snapped at."
In the following days, the Bush administration made its bitterness even more apparent:
Indeed, Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt told the mass circulation tabloid Bild that "it would be nice if the German government would focus on strengthening its contacts to us rather than already beginning to look for our successors."
The Chancellor's office immediately complied, choosing not to address its concerns privately to the Obama campaign but to publicly leak its disapproval --- committing an embarrassing diplomatic faux pas that now risks Germany's future relationship with someone who could be president of the United States.
In so doing, they also miss the deeper symbolism of the Brandenburg Gate --- a slender monument that for decades stood just behind the concrete walls, barbed wire, and watchtowers that enveloped East Berlin.
Once a monument to German imperialism, from which Napoleon once famously stole the golden chariot, then a symbol of Nazi Germany, the Gate somehow survived the carnage of Allied bombardment that leveled most of Berlin to be reborn as something else --- as a symbol of the world's commitment to freedom, a symbol of the world's solidarity with Germany, and now today, as a symbol of a unified Germany.
Kennedy, Reagan, and then Clinton in his time, insisted that as citizens of the world, we are also citizens of Berlin. That our plight, the plight of humanity, was bound up with the plight of a divided Berlin. That our freedom too was in peril, so long as Berlin was not free.
At a remarkable press conference yesterday, the Chancellor's spokesman and the Foreign Ministry's spokesman, sitting side by side, publicly disagreed for the first time:
As has once again been proven by the opening of the American embassy [directly alongside the Gate last week], the Gate is a "part of a collective German-American memory." Because of this background, a speech "before or by" the Gate, whether by Obama or the Republican candidate John McCain, is an "expression of the vibrancy of the friendship between Germany and America."
I, for one, still hope that we'll see Obama speak before the gate.
All translations from German media sources are my own. For further coverage of the Berlin speech, see One Million Strong.
UPDATE Greg Sargent posted his take here:
If Bush officials are privately trying to nix a speech that would give Obama a major boost it's an interesting development and raises more questions, such as whether the administration is possibly letting efforts to help McCain intrude on back-channel diplomacy in other areas.