Obama's European test

last updated 8 January 2015

President Obama “didn’t get everything he wanted in his first presidential foray onto the world stage,” said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune, “but he passed his audition.” At the Group of 20 economic summit, Obama got another trillion dollars of stimulus for the financial system. Europeans, who instead wanted tighter regulations for financial markets, at least got the impression that the "new sheriff" will listen as well as lead.

Of course the rest of the world loves Obama, said James Lewis in The American Thinker via RealClearPolitics. Our rock star president “bowed waist-deep to the King of Saudi Arabia, and proceeded to accuse his own country of arrogance.” That’s music to the ears of anyone who resents America’s power —but it also shows that we have elected a man who is “stunningly ignorant” of all the good this country has done.

The world knows the U.S. is capable of great things, said Mike Lupica in the New York Daily News, provided it has a “real American president.” And that’s why Europe applauded Obama—like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan before him, Obama talked of his vision for a better world. The new leader of the free world “thinks his job is building relationships instead of doing what Bush did: tearing them down.”