Gerhard Spörl thinks Obama will be Number 44, but doesn’t sound completely impressed:

It was a ton to absorb — and what a stupendous ride through world history: the story of his own family, the Berlin Airlift, terrorists, poorly secured nuclear material, the polar caps, World War II, America’s errors, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, freedom. It’s amazing one could even pack such a potpourri of issues into sentences and then succeed in squeezing them all into the space of a speech that lasted less than 30 minutes.

So what still sticks? That Barack Obama is a passionate politician who is fixated on and takes very seriously his desire for a bit of uptopia and a better world. That he is an impressive speaker who knows how to casually draw his audience into his image of the world — one who doesn’t have any need to resort to the kind of cheap effects that tend to prompt the uproarious applause of an audience. That he is a typical American — an idealist in the true spirit of the American success story who is now very casually making his claim to become something akin to the president of the world.

He also could have said: We are a world power, the only one that exists on this planet at the moment, and I am going to act as if that were the case. But you’re also allowed to participate in the attempt to try to save the world — at least a bit of it.

[…]

George W. Bush is yesterday, the Texas version of the arrogant world power. Obama is all about today: the “everybody really just wants to be brothers and save the world” utopia. As for us, we who sometimes admire and sometimes curse this somewhat anemic, pragmatic democracy, we will have to quickly get used to Barack Obama, the new leader of a lofty democracy that loves those big nice words — words that warm our hearts and alarm our minds.  

Let’s allow ourselves to be warmed today, by this man at the Victory Column. Then we’ll take a further look.

Then there’s this from Gregor Peter Schmitz:

Obama’s advisors had long feared that his speech would play off as too “European” back home in the US. So it was peppered with phrases that could easily have been uttered by current US President George W. Bush. The aim was singular: to present the Europeans with a clear picture of the new challenges of the 20th century.

Obama spoke about terrorists who studied at university in Hamburg. About poorly secured nuclear material in Russia that could fall into the wrong hands and be used in Paris. About poverty in Somalia that could breed the terror of tomorrow.

It certain that in this part of the speech, Obama makes allowances for issues he knows play well with the Europeans. He dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. He is establishing a new tenor on the issue of climate change, which the current US administration continued to deny even existed until only recently. “Let us resolve that all nations, including my own, will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere,” he said. The line drew the greatest applause of any other sentence he delivered in his speech.

But then he also spoke of the demands people in Europe had been expecting in his speech: 

• More European aid in Afghanistan. “America can not do this alone,” he said. “The Afghan people need our troops and your troops.”  
• Additional European support in Iraq: “The whole world should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close.”  
• Greater European participation in the war on terror — which won’t end under a President Obama, either. “If we could create NATO to face down the Soviet Union, we can join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the networks that have struck in Madrid and Amman; in London and Bali; in Washington and New York.”  

But what, precisely, is that supposed to mean? How many troops in Afghanistan? What kind of support for Iraq? And what will his new strategy against terrorists entail?

So far Obama has provided scarce details — and he has generated criticism in the US for not being more forthcoming with his ideas. For days now, his advisors have been warning that Obama is still just a presidential candidate and not the president. As such, he can only speak generally about his vision, and he can’t make any concrete policy proposals. But perhaps he also went too far in announcing that this was going to be a “keynote speech on trans-Atlantic” relations.