The Raabe Review

The visuals were phenomenal: Senator Barack Obama, the Brandenburg Gate, over 200,000 people listening attentively, cheering for an American leader as they used to. But what did he say?

Andrea Mitchell, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for NBC, said the speech was heavy on rhetoric. But Chuck Todd, Political Director and Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, said that the McCain campaign should have “ceded the week” to Obama. As Senator John Kerry noted, it was good to see Europeans cheering an American leader [for a change].

The Speech was more than presidential, it was globally unifying – something both Europeans and Americans need to hear. Invoking the history of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Obama called upon people of Berlin – and people of the world – to remake the world. He said that he knows America’s actions haven’t always lived up to her intentions, but that for more than two centuries we have strived to form a more perfect union and a more hopeful world. He said America has no allegiance to a particular land or region; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What drew his father to the shores of America was a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people. The shared aspirations of all nations are bigger than anything that drives us apart. Obama said it is “because of these shared aspirations that the airlift began and that all people everywhere became citizens of Berlin.”

Obama said “this is the moment when all nations must summon the spirit that led to the airlift.”  Here near the Brandenburg Gate, he continued, “we must insist that we never forget our common humanity and that history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one…Sixty years after the airlift, we are called upon again…when the German people tore down that wall, walls came tumbling down around the world…and the doors of democracy were opened.”

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