From the summation of Obama's speech today :
What has always united us - what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America's shores - is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.
This is a declaration of Obama's - and America's - new Self for the world...
Obama is returning the US - us- to the idea of America as the world's center of ideas - a nation founded on secular ideas, with its citizens being those who believe in its ideas, and defense and foreign policies built on the concept that those ideas are more powerful than armaments.
Obama's conclusion directly cites FDR's "Four Freedoms", which were first presented in FDR's State of the Union speech given on Jan 6, 1941:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want--which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
These "Four Freedoms", which you may know from Norman Rockwell's famous paintings, were so powerful they became the basis of the the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, perhaps the most translated document in human history. The Declaration was adopted by the United Nations in Dec 1948, right during the heart of the Berlin Airlift, and its most fervent and effective advocate was Eleanor Roosevelt, the President's widow.
This speech is as strategic and direct a message as Obama can make to the nations of Europe, considering that he is not elected President, but is simply a Senator and unofficial Part candidate. He is telling them all, as we here recognize, that the US is ready to be a true partner and brother in the family of the world.
But Obama's more direct campaign message is to those of us here. We must be citizens united not simply by our nationality, but by our humanity shared with the whole world. Our founding Document must be not only the Constitution, also be that of the UDHR.
Are we ready to fight for Internationalism as opposed to Iolationism? Are we ready to wage the equivalent of WWIII - still against totalitarianism - this time with ideas and education and beneficence rather than with bombs?
So if anyone asks you just "what sort of change Obama" wants, you can tell them: he wants us to be a citizen of the world, rather than its dictator.