Obama and Berlin

Politicians are creatures of their staff. And this becomes even more so as we climb the food chain to the presidential level.

So when we say that President Bush is clueless, we are really talking about the quality of his staff. Their job is to make him look good. Of course, he hired them, so it’s his fault if they screw up.

In the current flap about Obama’s speech in Berlin, we should keep this in mind. We can’t really expect Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to know all about the gaffe factors associated with making a speech at the Brandenburg Gate or at the Siegessäule.

But we should expect that his staff to be up to speed on the symbolic meaning of the Brandenburg Gate, built at the end of the eighteenth century with Viktoria looking east (to the greater Prussia created during the wars of Frederick II). And we should expect his staff to know about the Siegessäule, a column erected to the victory of Prussia over Denmark in 1862 and very much associated with the rise of imperial Germany.

Obviously, they don’t.

Maybe, of course, all this navel scratching about German monuments and their association with the Second Reich and the Third Reich is just twentieth century stuff. We are the ones we have been waiting for and all the Prussian militarism and Nazi stuff is so yesterday.

Of maybe it indicates that the Obama staff are narrow, arrogant, and shallow. And that the Obama administration will also be narrow, arrogant, and shallow.