A Good Sign

Posted on 07/24/2008 at 8:55 am by Bob Cesca

“Germans differentiate between America and the Bush Administration. They are not anti-American per se; on the contrary,” says Andreas Etges, professor for North American studies at Free University Berlin and curator of a local museum focused on the Kennedys. “Obama, not only because of his skin color, for many represents the other, better America.”

I hope the rest of the world makes a similar distinction. But more importantly, I hope our posterity does, too.

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  • PackyJ

    Bob,I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but as the son of an immigrant, I travel frequently to Ireland (I have a sister and nieces who live there, many cousins)… and I can verify that the Irish certainly differentiate between Dubya and America.Bush is seen as an incompetent buffoon, but they understand that he and his corrupt administration aren’t representative of most Americans.(They are, puzzled, tho, by the myopic disinterest many of us share regarding the rest of the world.)

  • PackyJ

    By the way – won’t it be nice to have a President of whom we can be proud?

  • http://fifty50blog.blogspot.com StuporMundi

    Forget posterity and the rest of the world. I hope about 60% of the U.S. electorate makes that distinction!

  • http://eclectablog.blogspot.com Eclectablog

    In the past 6 years, I’ve been to China, England, Germany, Canada and Brazil and I can say without reservation that the people in all of those countries are capable of nuanced thought and are very much able to make the distinction between Americans and American “leadership”. In every of these places Bush was seen as an embarrassment to the USA and had them scratching their heads as to how we could elect him once, much less twice.As an aside, I find the ability to make the distinction between Americans and their government to be refreshingly mature given how quick Americans can be to pigeonhole entire countries and their citizens as “like that” or “that way”. Sometimes I really think Americans need to grow up and quit acting like petulant children.