The Daily Background

So, how big was the crowd that met Obama in Berlin at his speech today?

German media predicted as much as 1 million people, a number that Obama flatly dismissed, saying “I doubt we’re gonna have a million screaming Germans.”

Images broadcast on CNN however indicate that the crowd was large enough to reach all the way from the Victory Column to the Brandenburg Gate, 1.3 miles away.

An approximate 20,000 people watched Regan’s 1987 speech to Berlin in which he called for Russia’s Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. 120,000 watched JFK’s speech there 24 years earlier.

In his actual speech, Obama dismissed President Bush’s unilateral go-it-alone attitude towards international cooperation, saying “America has no better partner than Europe. Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic.” International terrorism, poverty, human rights and climate change were the main subjects in his speech, which was interwoven with a narrative of the symbolic history of the city of Berlin.

Obama cited international struggles which he said could only be defeated if the US and Europe stood with the rest of the world against them. Among the examples he gave:

“The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all.”

In particular, Obama called for more NATO cooperation in Afghanistan (the country was mentioned 5 times, compared to just twice which was the number of times Obama referenced Iraq; Iran was mentioned twice as well). Obama’s concentration on Afghanistan signals the growing emphasis on the forgotten war.

Obama also got rousing applause when he talked about economic inequality, called for an end to the war in Iraq, and proclaimed that “This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.”

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