The Next JFK

Nine days and counting. Nine days, and the United States will elect the country’s next president. But Americans aren’t the only ones waiting with breath that is bated.
Here in Germany, almost everyone I meet blatantly asks me about the upcoming election once they find out I am American. They inform me that Germany tends to be Democratic — as if I already didn’t know — and again and again they voice how popular Barack Obama is in their country and in Europe as a whole.
Obama’s status in Europe — and in Germany in particular — stretches much further beyond his opposition to the Iraq war, which has always been a point of contention for Europeans. His desire to strengthen ties between America and Europe by calling for a renewed partnership has sparked a trend within the local news agencies to begin dubbing Obama as the next John F. Kennedy, saying that his hope and optimism — revealed particularly in his speeches — are reminiscent of the nation’s 35th president.
“The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand,” Obama said earlier this summer to a crowd of more than 200,000 at the Tiergarten in Berlin. “The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”
These comparisons between the Illinois senator and the famous young president aren’t kept under wraps either. Several mediums in Germany have expressed this common view: The Berliner Morgenpost has published the headline, "The New Kennedy;" the tabloid Bild went with, "This Black American Has Become the New Kennedy!" and an editorial in the Frankfurter Rundschau reached even further back into history and read: "Lincoln, Kennedy, Obama."
This fascination with Barack Obama can be tied to Europe’s many years of disenchantment with the Bush administration, said Christian Hacke, a political science professor at Bonn University during an interview for Cologne, Germany’s Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. Hope for a new policy, and one much more based on international cooperation, is huge, he said.
Germans are less impressed with Obama’s Republican rival John McCain, who stated in an interview for the BBC that while his opposition was in Europe for his world tour, he would continue to focus on issues concerning the U.S.
"I'd love to give a speech in Germany but I'd much prefer to do it as president of the United States rather than as a candidate for president," McCain said in the interview.
Perhaps it is this campaign tactic that has left McCain with fewer German supporters, (or perhaps they are still upset about the incident that took place during a town hall meeting in Des Moines, Iowa where McCain referred to Germany’s leader as “President Putin of Germany,”) but one thing is for sure: this group of Europeans is putting all of their dreams for international reconciliation in this charismatic presidential hopeful.
“Germans have a deep appreciation for romanticism and even beyond that — sentimentalism. This romantic leaning is what opened Germans' hearts to Kennedy. Just the way Obama's promise to unify the country and lead it to a new greatness is opening the hearts of Americans for him,” Hacke said.
So when gracing the voting booth next Tuesday, ask yourself, would you rather have the next JFK or another George W. Bush?