What with all this current drama about Obama under pressure, it’s curious to see some contrarian media pieces about him now starting to appear in the foreign press – “contrarian” in the sense of reacting sharply to the “Obama myth” by making instead the point “just what’s so special about this guy, anyway?” One of these is “Opposing Obama,” a broadcast on the BBC World Service in which Guardian journalist Gary Younge (who is British and black) tours the US finding people “who think Barack Obama’s presidency is nothing but bad news.” Anybody interested should be able to click on the above link starting tomorrow (1 February 2010) and hear the program, or just hear it as it is periodically scheduled on the BBC World Service broadcast itself (listenable on-line, of course), starting tomorrow at 5.05 hours Eastern Standard Time.

Then there is also the recent article on the website of Cicero, the German-language “Magazine for Political Culture,” entitled Man Without Qualities (a title which is identical to, and therefore presumably some sort of a reference to, the highly-acclaimed (although very long, and unfinished) 1930s novel Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften by Robert Musil). Here, Leon de Winter takes Obama thoroughly to the cleaners:

• First of all, the only reason Barack Obama got elected president in the first place is race, pure and simple. Although handsome and well-spoken, he didn’t really accomplish much in the US Senate during his limited years there, so it wasn’t really a matter of being most-qualified. Rather, he managed to come under the wing of David Axelrod, the Chicago-based political consultant and expert in promoting black candidates (as he had done already in getting Deval Patrick elected as the first-ever black governor of Massachusetts). Axelrod managed to make Obama’s election as president inevitable, by turning it into a sort of cleansing ritual, both of America’s troubled racial history and of the unhappy previous two terms of George W. Bush.
  
• For that matter, Obama is also simply a creation of the Chicago political machine (of which Axelrod is an important component part). He’s just a machine politician, and continues to kow-tow to the head of that machine, Chicago mayor Richard Daley – that’s the only reason why he went to Copenhagen back last October in the first place, to try to sell the International Olympic Committee on bestowing the 2016 Summer Games (and the huge pay-off they represent) to Daley’s city.
  
• For that matter, De Winter claims, if Obama is not some sort of leftist radical now, there is plenty of evidence that he was one such during his early adulthood, the formative years for his political views. Why is it, he asks, that the President has been unwilling to release academic transcripts or any of the papers he wrote while he was an undergraduate at Columbia and Occidental College. Ah yes, Columbia, where he ultimately received his B.A. in 1983: that was the home of, among other leftist professors, the radical pro-Palestinian Edward Said. Who knows to what degree Obama’s thought could have been infected there by such professors as that?
  
• Ultimately, though (and ironically), Barack Obama is really not black at all. Only one of his parents was black, of course, and he was Kenyan, and so not a black American coming from out of the heritage of slavery and Jim Crow. So he doesn’t really count as a black man, although that point has obviously gone straight over the head of the vast majority of the American electorate.

There you have it. And who is this Leon de Winter? He’s a Dutch novelist and film-maker of some sort of renown in the Benelux and Germany, from an orthodox Jewish family, who currently spends a good part of his time living in Los Angeles. So he presumably has all the access he needs to become as sharp an observer of American affairs as he wants take the time to become – indeed his Wikipedia entry alleges that a couple of years ago he was considering taking his family to live in the US permanently. So he’s an “Americanophile” – and, since he’s European, you’d also expect him to be well under Obama’s spell. Clearly, he’s not, but he also would seem to have no particular axe to grind about the President either.

Right after that hit SOTU speech, we also found out (or were reminded) that Obama does know his policy and is a master of debate, even if that is against 200+ Republican members of the US Congress, all at once. (The video of that recent encounter at a hotel in Baltimore is here.) And clearly many of the claims being made against the president (“socialist,” “not born in the USA,” etc.) are way off-base. But it just might be useful, on occasion, to be exposed to something deviating from the usual hero-worship, especially if it comes from a source with no apparent inherent bias.

Noteworthy reaction flowed promptly in two articles from that pillar of the French journalistic establishment, Le Monde. One of them (Obama’s words: work, economy, and Americans; no byline) literally offers at its head a “word-cloud” of the speech’s most-frequent terms (actually, their French equivalents) and then, by way of analysis, a hyper-short summary of his essential message: “Don’t panic.” Yes, it’s true that the president’s emphasis was much more on the economy and creating jobs, rather than on that health care reform legislation that still sits tantalizingly close to final passage. But what was of far more interest to Le Monde’s writer here was those foreign policy topics to which Obama gave short shrift, as he only briefly discussed Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, skimmed China, Russia, Germany, India, the Koreas, and said nothing at all about Pakistan or the Israeli-Palestinian peace-process! (Nor about France, come to think of it.)

A companion Le Monde article (Obama like in the first days; also no explicit byline) notes how surprisingly sprightly Obama appeared before the assembled Congress (“with a rediscovered insolence and combativeness”), just like in the old days, oh so long ago, when he was eating John McCain’s lunch on the campaign trail. This writer also issues a fitting, if cynical summary of the president’s economic message: focus on jobs this year (an election year); focus on reducing the deficit only the year after that.

For its part, the conservative paper Le Figaro contributes a lengthy review of Obama’s SOTU speech from its Washington correspondent, Laure Mandeville (Employment, Obama’s priority for 2010). I’m pretty sure “Laure” is a French woman’s name, for Ms. Mandeville not only mentions Barack’s feistiness (“more resolute and offensive than ever”) but also gets in a reference to Michelle’s couture (she was wearing a jupe bouffant violine – some sort of fancy skirt). At the same time, she captures well the lecturing, lightly-scolding tone prevalent especially in his speech’s second half, and directed largely at the Republican opposition, reflecting his greater theme of “we [i.e. the country] just can’t go on like this!”

Bonus: The judgment on Obama’s SOTU speech is also out from the foremost Danish expert on American affairs, Prof. Niels Bjerre-Poulsen of the Copenhagen Business School (as reported by Ritzau, so it’s pretty much the representative Danish journalistic view; actually published in this instance in the opinion newspaper Information). With this excellent speech, opines the good professor, Obama once again showed his strong side to the nation: that is, in speech-making, in this case in a tight situation and with many contradictory points to make. But the resulting goodwill will only last so long, and it takes much different political skills to translate such fancy words into concrete results. We still have to see if the president is similarly gifted with those latter.

The hat-tip for the one noticing this first must go to Jillian Rayfield, affiliated with Talking Points Memo, and then just yesterday David Kurtz from the same site posted a slide-show on the subject. But I soon found my way to the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the German- and English-language website belonging to the musical itself. Check it out: there’s some good information there, even if the English version is written by someone not in complete control of that language and with a fondness for the phrase inter alia (actually a Latin expression, for all you non-lawyers out there, meaning “among others”). The songs that make up the show will surely become hits, it says there, for “[e]xperts of the German music scene” are sure they have that “Earth Wind and Fire [sic] quality”! Even more intriguingly, we learn that “Hope” is the first “interactive musical,” during which most of the audience will sit on cubes (called “percussion chairs”) that double as instruments and so will be encouraged to drum (and even get up off those chairs to dance) along with the performers! Wow!

Right, so how have the reviews been so far? Of the two I can find, the one from the home-town paper the Frankfurter Rundschau (Border of Gaiety) cannot truly be regarded as independent, since the musical’s producers announce right on their site’s “News” page that the FR is a “mediapartner.” Yes, Barack Obama’s story (and a parallel plot-line about the troubles of a South Chicago community) does turn out to be a suitable subject for a musical, opines reviewer Judith von Sternburg, even though back in the real world, after a whole year in office, ugly Reality has already caught up with the President. Von Sternburg is independent-minded enough to label Hillary Clinton’s portrayal (performed by American actress and “Evita” veteran Tracy Plester, who needs only a quick wardrobe-and-wig-change to render Sarah Palin as well) as “a caricature.” Van Sternburg also manages to pick up on, and mention in her piece, the line spoken by the actor representing a son fighting in Iraq, who comes back home just as Obama is elected and declares that surely the war will soon be over now – something the stage-side English-to-German translator at the premier performance skips.

The other review is from the Financial Times Deutschland (Out of Office: Obama Mia!), by Willy Theobald, who it emerges did not attend the actual premier but rather a previous dress-rehearsal. At least that enabled him also to grab an interview with the show’s producer and director, Roberto Emmanuele, who declares to him “Musicals I generally find boring” – as indeed does Herr Theobald – but “I want to make a musical that is fresher [knackiger] and more innovative than all the others.” He goes on: “Our music has quite a lot of hit-potential,” and Theobald does admit that he finds many of the songs “rather infectious” (richtig mitreißend). In the end, the FTD reviewer gives those behind “Hope” a lot of credit, although he can’t resist wondering whether the work will soon need to add another act at the end – one about Yemen.

The verdicts so far out of Germany, then – as few as they are – seem largely positive. Is it perhaps time to go on-line to order your tickets as well as a round-trip flight to Frankfurt-am-Main? Here’s a final YouTube tidbit to help you make your decision:

American relations with Kenya will always be of special interest during the term of the Obama administration because of Obama’s personal ties and family history there, as will be relations with Indonesia for the same reason. However, and very interestingly, so far this effect is operating in the opposite way that you would expect. It almost seems as if both countries need to suffer a little bit, just to show that Obama is not going to play any favorites. In mid-November, for example, the American president is scheduled for an important tour of Asian countries: China, Japan, Korea, of course, also Singapore – but not Indonesia. Of course, it’s merely the most-populous Muslim nation; perhaps Obama is taking a break now from his “Arab outreach” efforts that previously featured a speech to Iranians and a speech directed to the Arab World, given in Cairo.

And then there is Kenya and the ANP report. The US “threat” is namely directed against high government officials and other “high-earners” there, and amounts to a refusal to give them visas anymore to visit the US. That apparently really hurts; rich Kenyans just love to head to the States to spend their money. But in the judgment of the US government nothing has been done to bring about promised reforms ever since the mess of the disputed national election at the end of 2007/beginning of 2008, which led to violence in which around 1,300 people died. In fact, no one has even been prosecuted in connection with that violence. So a fire needs to be lit under some people there.

The thing that caught my eye here, though – other than that it involves Kenya, homeland of Barack Obama Sr. – was the US official charged with paying a visit to Nairobi to deliver the bad news: Johnnie Carson, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Of course he’s not the real Johnny Carson (also note the different spelling), or he would be showing up just to practice his golf-swing. He’s merely a distinguished American career diplomat, a multiple award-winner for his service (including for directing the US Government’s anti-HIV/AIDS efforts in Kenya), who previously served as American ambassador to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda.

Perusing L’Humanité will further inform you – as looking at the Fox News article will not – that the paper that originally broke this story, appropriately enough, was Spain’s El País. So let’s go there and take a look: we can also handle the Spanish beat here on EuroSavant, though we don’t do it often.

There are but a few additional factual bits to add to the story from the El País treatment, by the paper’s correspondents in Havana, Miguel González and Mauricio Vicent, although they are interesting enough. Like perhaps the reaction to Obama’s initiative from Cuban President Raúl Castro, as conveyed afterwards by the Spanish Foreign Minister (who met with him for three hours)? Remember, now: we’re in the realm of diplomat-speak here. Moratinos: “Raúl Castro received Obama’s election positively, and has great respect for him, and has also greeted in a satisfactory manner certain actions and decisions he [Obama] has taken.” That’s it.

Otherwise, there’s the interesting tidbit that Moratinos actually had the chance to speak with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after Obama and Zapatero had met in the Oval Office, but before he went to Cuba; strangely, the two foreign ministers spoke of the situation in the Honduras and the Middle East, but not about Cuba. (I think that right there shows you how serious an initiative this was meant to be by Obama, namely not very: it was really only something that simply occurred to him when he was meeting with Zapatero and learned that his foreign minister would soon have talks with Castro.) Also, Moratinos took the occasion of his visit in Havana to announce that Spain would make it one of its priorities, during the six months as EU president that will start in January, to bring about an “association agreement” between the EU and Cuba.

That is easier said than done, and the El País piece does provide some good background about this whole issue of Cuba vis-à-vis the EU. For the EU, Cuba is supposedly not a matter of foreign policy, but rather domestic, claim González and Vicent, I suppose because of the great interest Spain holds in it. Yet it will be hard for Moratinos to fulfill his “association agreement” promise, for at least two reasons: 1) Several EU countries are not willing to concede so much to Cuba as long as it holds political prisoners and abuses human rights. (Germany, Sweden, and the Czech Republic are specifically named here); and 2) Spain might not get its EU presidency next year anyway, since the Lisbon Treaty – if ratified in time – will do away with country-presidencies and substitute instead an actual one-person “President of the European Council,” elected by EU member-states (represented by their governments) for a two-and-a-half-year term.

Actually, the Ritzau/Berlingske coverage here is really at-one-remove, as they basically pass on original reporting that appeared in the Norwegian newspaper VG. That article you can find here (“Nobel-majority argued against Obama”), and even if you don’t understand Norwegian you really should click through to take a look, because it offers a great prize: there you can see in a photograph, sitting around a table, the actual group of Norwegian notables (“socialists,” “muddled-headed Europeans,” “Obama-groupies,” “Devil’s spawn,” however you want to characterize them) who were directly responsible for him receiving the prize. The three ladies with their heads circled were actually the doubters; in fact, Berlingske quotes the right-most of them (i.e. turning to her left to address the camera) as remarking later to the press “I had expected more debate, especially over the fact that I myself regard as problematic, namely the war in Afghanistan.”

By the way, the committee doesn’t have six members, but five, so that one of the gentlemen off to the right is not actually a voting-member and doesn’t belong there. I’m guessing that the bona fide guy is probably with the red necktie, and that would be the committee chairman, former Norwegian prime minister and current Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland. He’s really the one Obama can thank for his Prize (assuming that Obama is actually grateful for the Prize; there are reasons for thinking that he isn’t): despite the three nay-sayers dismissing the President’s candidacy from early in the selection-discussions, Jagland persevered as chairman (with some support from the one lady whose head is not circled, Sissel Rønbeck) and finally got his way. “The rest,” as they say, “is history” – but one can still speculate on what the outcome would have been had the three dissenters been male and the committee chairman female.

- From the Danish Christian newspaper, Kristeligt Dagblad (Obama gives Nobel money to a good cause): Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama intends to give the 10 million Swedish kroner prize-money to a good cause, which he has not yet had time to specifically identify, according to a White House spokesman. He will also travel to Oslo on December 10 to accept the award there; Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg has already discussed this with him. Ah, but you may also be asking: How will this sudden new Scandinavian appointment affect the US president’s involvement at the UN’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen which will be going on at the same time? According to this report, it does not necessarily increase the chances that Obama will actually decide to attend that climate change conference.

(Note: This is a report from the Ritzau news agency, so the identical text appears in several other Danish newspapers as well. But in one of those we get the added detail that the “expert” behind the above calculation that Obama’s appointment in Oslo in December won’t necessary mean he shows up for the climate conference in Copenhagen – which, by the way, I don’t believe for a second – is namely Aarhus University Professor of Contemporary History Thorsten Borring Olesen.)

- The daily Berlingske Tidende offers some commentary in one article (Obama: Both a certain and a controversial choice), but doesn’t bother to credit the journalist(s) involved. Anyway: Awarding the prize to Obama was certain (sikkert): he is popular everywhere on this Earth, the nearest thing to every man’s friend. Awarding the prize to Obama was, however, controversial: Obama has been all about promises so far, not results. Maybe the Nobel committee was impressed with the resolution calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons that he managed to have the UN Security Council pass a few weeks ago while he functioned as its Chairman – on the other hand, in reality none of the nuclear powers, including the US, has done anything to fulfill the promise they made to the rest of the world at the time of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, back in 1968, that they would work to reduce and then eliminiate their nuclear arsenals, in exchange for that rest of the world giving up any idea of developing nuclear weapons of their own. Or perhaps it’s about his efforts to counteract climate change, or to shut Guantánamo – except, again, there actually hasn’t been tangible progress in these areas, either. No, the purposes the Nobel committee had in giving this prize to the President was both to give him “a tremendous moral pat on the shoulder” and to pointedly remind other countries (the exact Danish phrase is “hint with a wagon-pole”) that the American president is going to need some help from them if what he has promised is going to come true – so that that Nobel committee doesn’t find itself embarrassed a few years down the road at what it did today.

- The preeminent Danish opinion weekly, Information hasn’t yet gotten around to providing its own judgment or study of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama. For now, it presents an analysis (again from Ritzau) from Prof. Peter Viggo Jacobsen, of the Copenhagen University Social Sciences Faculty (Obama is a highly surprising choice). Along with about a billion other people around the world, he interprets the prize as being awarded in anticipation of future achievements, not of past accomplishments since “he has not been able yet to carry out anything at all.” Further Jacobsen:

Normally there should be more then words [behind the award]. There should also be some action. And action is what we haven’t seen much of yet. This has to be in anticipation of something later, that the [Nobel] committee believes that he is capable of realizing some of the good intentions he has.

“What happened” was of course primarily President Obama’s personal visit to the Danish capital to try to exert his inluence and personal charm to take his adopted hometown over the top. But anywhere the President of the USA goes, he projects his own kind of force-field that inevitably disturbs the civic space that he is passing through. This was no less the case for his quick in-and-out visit to present Chicago’s case before the IOC, as a number of Danish papers report, among which Jyllands-Posten which notes Obama delayed 41 flights. That was the damage to the flight-schedule suffered by Copenhagen’s airport, Kastrup, from the effect of the arrival and departure of Air Force One, and additionally traffic on city streets and even the train schedule were severely disrupted by Obama’s presence. Even the magnificent Øresundsbro, that suspension-bridge between Malmö in Sweden and Copenhagen, was closed for a while for security considerations.

All this was despite the fact that the Bella Center, where all the IOC stuff was going on, is nowhere near downtown, historic Copenhagen but rather in the southern suburbs (on that big island there that is called Amager) which is right where the airport is as well – except that, you see, the president also thought it courteous to head into the historic city itself to visit Queen Margarethe and Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen. What’s more, 43 people were temporarily arrested by the Danish police in connection with the president’s visit, as Berlingske Tidende reports, mainly for trying to erect banners at various prominent points along the presidential motorcade. Local Greenpeace activitists were among those involved; the message in all cases had to do with climate change – “Obama, right city, wrong date” – which looked ahead to that big UN climate change conference which will also be held in Copenhagen in two months’ time and made clear that he was expected to be there as well.

Ah yes, but the voting, the city-on-city competition: How could Chicago have lost so resoundingly, as the very first candidate to be culled from the list? A key source shedding light on this question for Berlingske Tidende was Kai Holm, a Danish (female) former IOC member who stayed close to the action. Said Holm:

That Barack Obama came was not enough to do it. I believe what was missing was any feeling, it was all too empty and business-like. When Tony Blair was promoting London [for the British capital's successful campaign to win the 2012 games] he went around lobbying for three days and talked with people. You can’t just come in one day on the train and try to influence everything. . . . People felt that there was a lack of respect for the Olympics and for sport as a whole.

According to that view, then, Obama’s lightning visit to the Danish capital was not enough, indeed, it unfortunately showed a certain lack of respect. If he was serious he would have spent much more time there – and neglected the fight in Congress over reform to American health care, what to do in Afghanistan, negotiations with Iran, etc., but you know, you have to have your priorities right! This assessment was reinforced in another Berlingske Tidende article (entitled Rio won – Obama lost) by another good source, Professor of sports history at the University of Copenhagen, Hans Bonde: “That Chicago burned out so early shows me that Barack Obama did not understand the IOC’s psychology,” i.e. he was deluded that such a lightning-visit would in any way be effective in persuading people to change their votes.

A Near-Run Thing for Madrid

From the Danish coverage it’s also somewhat of a surprise that Madrid did not emerge the winner. Politiken reports that the Spanish capital actually came in first in the first round of balloting – the one where Chicago came in last. Madrid also had some famous personalities pleading its case, such as King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia together with Spanish premier José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero – of course – but also Real Madrid hero Raúl and – the Spanish ace-in-the-hole – Juan Antonio Samaranch, who headed the IOC from 1980 to 2001 and is now its honorary president. As Berlingske Tidende reports, Samaranch played the death card: “Dear colleagues, I am very near the end,” said the 89-year-old Spaniard (Minister for Sports in the government of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco). “May I ask you to consider conferring on my country the honor of being the host for the Olympic Games in Madrid [sic].” But, obviously, it didn’t work; the word is that, apart from the considerations that pointed to Rio de Janeiro as a more-deserving host, Madrid’s failure had much to do with its presentation before the Committee, in which the city tried to brand itself as “sexy” but nonetheless came off as somewhat dull.

So the decision went to Rio instead, despite what Jyllands-Posten called the continuing concerns about the place’s “corruption, bad sewage system and massive criminality.” Still, Brazil did host the 2007 Pan American Games there and those came off well, so it had eased those worries somewhat. And as the decision was announced Brazilian President Lula da Silva was both emotional and gracious, as Berlingske Tidende again reports. After shedding public tears of joy, he took care to thank his counterpart heads-of-government for a good, honorable competition: President Obama, King Juan Carlos . . . and also that Japanese guy, whose name he couldn’t quite recall. (That would be new Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama; but really, don’t they all look the same anyway?)

UPDATE: The interesting prospect has been raised on-line that it was what foreigners have to put up with, post-9/11, just to enter the US that sunk Chicago’s bid. (Also here, and even better.) I have to admit, though, that I didn’t find anything to that effect as I surveyed the Danish press – and believe me, I was looking for it.

UPDATE II: C’mon now, people!! Why couldn’t they have gone with Madrid after all? Samaranch said he was going to die soon, and the dear old fascist meant it!! This report in the premier Flemish newspaper De Standard reports how the 89-year-old just suffered yet another heart attack and had to be taken to hospital. It’s a fairly brief report; it doesn’t say where this happen, other than that the former chairman of the International Olympic Committee was attending the Sportel International festival, which we can easily find out on the ‘Net takes place in Monaco. He should be OK, then: plenty of rich people live there, so there is top-notch medical care available as well.

Not to worry, though, because French president Nicolas Sarkozy praised Obama’s move as an “excellent decision,” and the editors at Le Monde make it clear that they agree (Hand extended). Yes, the proposed deployment was going to be expensive, for a weapons system about which there remained significant doubts that it ever would actually be able to do what was designed for. But don’t forget the diplomatic dividends, either, Le Monde reminds us. These mainly involve Iran, which is supposed to start multilateral talks with a range of western countries starting on October 1; Obama’s action sends them a message of “good will and realism.” And Russia? Obama’s gesture was directed there to an even greater extent, but Le Monde’s editors unfortunately do not expect to see any corresponding gesture from the Kremlin anytime soon.

By the way, mention should also be made of the announcement by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, noted in Le Monde’s news coverage of the American announcement, that the “SM-3″ missiles which are now to be the replacement anti-missile system will be deployed in turn from 2015 in Poland and the Czech Republic. First of all, that is a bit over-determined: mainstream US news reports put it instead that deployment of those missiles to those countries is but a possibility. And that’s a good thing, too: recall that the original ten defensive rockets that were to be intalled in Poland were designed to counter Iranian missiles of intercontinental range. Poland presumably is a good spot to deploy those – just take a string to your globe to check out the great circle route from Iran to the USA – but that is probably not also the case for defense against the short- and medium-range missiles which are now assumed to be the only Iranian threat for many years to come. In light of this, these suggestions that Warsaw and Prague will eventually get their missiles after all have to be regarded as sheer political bull-headedness – “We won’t let anyone tell us we can’t station missiles in Eastern Europe!” – rather than anything based on considerations of military effectiveness.

In a report from the Danish news agency Ritzau that appears in the leading daily Politiken (Copenhagen will manage without Obama) city spokespersons reacted calmly to the development. Said Morten Mølholm Hansen of the Danish Sporting Union (Idræts-Forbund) which will be the IOC’s host:

Of course we would have preferred to see Obama come to the city. But on the other hand I will say that the congress will attract such attention by itself that that is not decisive. So many big names will come to Copenhagen, and the the decision itself about who will become the host-city is so interesting for the entire world, that this will not disturb our concept.

This assessment is shared by communications consultant Henrik Byager, who points out that, after all, Barack Obama may not be coming but it seems that Michelle and Oprah Winfrey will – “the two most prominent women of all in the USA.” Besides, there is also that big United Nations climate change conference scheduled for Copenhagen for this December. Obviously it would not do to have the US president attend both, and if they had to choose one the Danes would prefer that he be at the latter, which actually has to do directly with Danish interests.

UPDATE: Ah, but it seems they’ll get Obama early anyway! Twice within three months, in fact, since he is certainly going to the December UN climate change conference as well. So much for “Obviously it would not do . . .”

FURTHER UPDATE: OK, who really knows whether Obama will actually show up again in Copenhagen in December?