Berlin Buzzing About Barack
Posted by Matt Ortega · July 24, 2008
“Yes We Can” invaded Germany today as the people of Berlin start to pack the site of Senator Barack Obama’s (D-Illinois) much-hyped speech. Boston Globe:
“Berlin has high expectations for Obama,” Der Tagesspiegel reported on its front today. “Ich bin ein Kennedy,” Das Zeit quipped, with the type of front-page irony that the Chicago crowd has recently made clear it does not find funny. “Obama Superman?” asked a German TV network, during its wall-to-wall day-long coverage of speech preparations.
Hours before Obama was set to take the stage at the Victory Column, crowds were already streaming through the Tiergarten park to the site. Many of them had been drawn to the location by Bauhaus-styled postcards promoting the event which Obama staff had stacked at local cafes and handed out to pedestrians.
At the site of Checkpoint Charlie, where the Berlin Wall once separated east from west, two teenage women dressed in Army uniforms for pictures with curious tourists — one euro per photo op — were joined by a stars-and-stripes “Yes, We Can” placard their boss had propped between them that morning.
Senator Obama is scheduled to speak at 1pm Eastern and will be carried live on the major cable stations, as well as streamed by the Huffington Post and Barack Obama’s campaign website. Members of the American foreign service will have to watch online like most because the U.S. government barred them from attending.
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