US Image in the world continues to slide.

[Savannahmann]

First the link.

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/03/19268887-us-image-in-world-slips-as-conflicts-deflate-obama-euphoria?lite

Then the snip

Surveys from different parts of the world show the initial goodwill toward the U.S. from the international community after Obama assumed office has waned and recent headlines point to some reasons why -- Revelations of U.S. international surveillance, the manhunt of information leaker Edward Snowden, drone strikes in foreign countries and the continued unrest in Syria have exposed the traditional fault lines of international relations.

Then the rant.

The biggest mistake we've made since 2009 is obvious. We continued all the policies and practices that Damned Bush in the eyes of not only the world, but here at home. So many here have said much the same thing for so long that it is beyond debatable at this point. It was and is a huge mistake, and the fact that we are still discussing this five years later is unbelievable.

Another snip.

Right after Obama won in 2008, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in working to end apartheid, gushed, “It can't be true that Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan, is the next president of the United States. But it is true, exhilaratingly true. An unbelievable turnaround.”

He added, “The Bush administration has riled people everywhere. Its bully-boy attitude has sadly polarized our world. Against all this, the election of Barack Obama has turned America's image on its head.”

More rant

If only we had lived up to the principles, the ideals we had promoted and argued for in getting elected. Sadly, we did not. Who knows what kind of world we would be living in if we had. We wouldn't be facing backlash among the people of the world for Bush Co spying programs, we wouldn't be running around the world twisting arms to try and get our hands on a whistleblower. We wouldn't be refusing to discuss drone strikes except in the abstract, because there wouldn't be any things like that.

A hundred years from now, historians will describe Bush as an authoritarian jackass who lied, cheated, and who committed unspeakable acts against the world, and his own nation. Unfortunately, the next chapter will cover President Obama, and how he continued those same policies. Imagine what that chapter could have said, imagine what could have been written about this time.

[graham4anything]

1. President Obama has an 85% favorable rating in Germany. Nuff said. nt.

[liberal N proud]

3. Thank you!

[ChairmanAgnostic]

4. Not anymore.

Nuff said.

[Blanks]

19. Really?

Last edited Fri Jul 5, 2013, 12:09 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/06/18/in-germany-they-still-love-obama/

Edit: Original link was not what I had intended.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

30. I referred to Obama's popularity in Germany. It's falling, and it can't get up

[Downwinder]

5. Spying Survey: German Trust in US at Lowest Level Since Bush

A survey released late on Thursday found that only 49 percent of Germans now view the United States as trustworthy,
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023173425

[Fuddnik]

20. Just wait until we elect Hillary.

It will go through the basement.

[temmer]

6. you don't read the comments section of German newspapers, do you?

Obama's rating has plummeted with the surveillance scandal.

[snappyturtle]

7. Not according to this article:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023173425

[cali]

8. sorry, but that is no longer true.

[idwiyo]

11. Dear G4A, please wake up! It's July 2013 outside! Seriuosly!

[dipsydoodle]

16. This year in Berlin wasn't like 2008

2008 :



2013 :



I don't believe the figure of 85% to be current.

[Blanks]

22. The podium looks empty in the second photo.

That looks like propaganda to me. The second photo looks like people beginning to gather, while the first photo is obviously while Obama is at the podium.

[dipsydoodle]

23. If you search

you will find there were c. 6000 people there this year.

There's a video here : http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nbc-news/52251928#52251928

The actual reason he took his jacket off was that his teleprompter fucked up and he was getting hot with frustration.

[Blanks]

28. Interestingly, the crowd that was shown in the video...

Seemed much larger than the crowd in the second photo.

I don't know what 'taking his jacket off' has to do with the fact that the second photo was of an empty podium and a gathering crowd.

This looks like the kind of propaganda that I would see from my Obama hating 'friends' on Facebook. In fact I'm almost certain that I've seen it there, posted by Obama haters.

It's intentionally deceptive. There isn't anything in the first photo to indicate that there was a crowd larger than 6000. The photo was cropped.

I just wonder what you're doing spreading right-wing propaganda at what is clearly a democratic message board. It's not really the same as being critical of the presidents policies. It's just a good old fashioned smear.

[dipsydoodle]

32. It was in context with alleged approval in Germany

Nothing else. Pissing off Europe , as has happened with the NSA issues , isn't necessarily a wholly good idea.

[liberal N proud]

25. This year was an invite only event

Something FOX conveniently forgot to mention and obviously their little omission of facts works.

[Divernan]

35. Old data; his approval ratings dropped since then.

[nashville_brook]

37. isn't this a DU meme? "approval rate at 85%!11"

been a while since i've seen it.

ah, good times.

[dipsydoodle]

2. A hundred years from now

Wikipedia will have long since filed the USA under Animal Farm.

[Savannahmann]

17. Sadly, I think you may be right.

It's a disappointing thing isn't it?

[Quantess]

9. The world still likes him better than W.

The rating had bottomed out in 2007 at a net negative 30, climbed above zero after Obama was elected and then began to fall in 2012 – although it is still far higher than in 2007.

In a larger survey conducted between December 2012 and April 2013 of more than 26,000 people in 21 countries, 45 percent had a mostly positive view of the United States while 34 percent had a mainly negative view of the United States.
“Views in China have worsened (since last year): only one in five Chinese respondents (20%) hold positive views (down nine points). With 57 per cent holding negative views (up nine points), China has the third-most negative attitude towards the USA, after Pakistan (stable at 64%) and Turkey,” the report from the BBC World Service said.

[Savannahmann]

10. That certainly isn't much of a comparison.

It's like saying you prefer to eat the stew I made (I am a terrible cook of stews) than a plate full of turds. Not really much of a comparison.

[Quantess]

12. I choose to see the glass as half-full.

My point is, the world was delighted and looking forward to "Change" in 2008. After very little change has been delivered, the enthusiasm has waned. But he's still not as bad as W!

[byeya]

15. Not as bad as W, I agree, but I was expecting something better.

[A Simple Game]

29. Not as bad as W. Is that really the benchmark we want to use? n/t

[idwiyo]

13. I hope it was a Tongue in Cheek post, in which case I do recommend to use sarcasm smilie.

[Quantess]

14. I actually don't know myself whether it was tongue in cheek.

I was not being sarcastic, though. Just calling it as I see it, and you can make up your own mind whether the glass is half-empty or half-full.

[idwiyo]

18. Neither. I prefer to judge him on his own merit. I definitely don't judge entire country based on

their president of the moment.

[Fuddnik]

21. 2013: "Same shit, different flies".

[nashville_brook]

24. i remember when Obama took office there was talk about "leave behinds" hired by Cheney

who were installed throughout administrative posts and bureaucratic leadership positions -- presumably/especially in intelligence -- who would be difficult to jettison and who would certainly be opposed to the "transparency" ethic of the new admin.

i don't know how truthful these whisper-campaigns are, but they do beg the question of how much the executive branch is in control. add to that the problem of private contractors and generals with vendettas, and it's easy to imagine a government divided against itself.

one would think that this scenario would provide political cover for an executive branch wanting to make changes. identify the sources of trouble, get rid of them and carry on. but that's not what happened. something intervened and to speak in the broadest of terms, likely the nature of that "something" involved a power struggle.

what we know for sure is that Team Obama abandoned the Transparency Project very early in the administration...the question is who got in the way. was it someone on the team? was it an adversarial agency? was it the sum of all the leave-behinds blocking change?

with the current NSA spying scandal, and what we know about how pernicious the problem is, it's my feeling that we either figure this out or we head down a really dark path the next time a republican puppet is elected.

[byeya]

26. Yes and at the same time there were posts on how to deal effectively with the "leave behinds"

which should have been taken but were not. Now the lack of effective control Obama has over parts of the bureacracy is coming back to drag him down.
It could have been averted if the will to do so had been there.

[nashville_brook]

33. Sy Hersh on "stay behinds" -->

ThinkProgress did a piece on Sy Hersh's appearance on Fresh Air with Terry Gross


http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2009/03/31/37200/hersh-cheney-behind/


Hersh: Cheney ‘Left A Stay Behind’ In Obama’s Government, Can ‘Still Control Policy Up To A Point

(snip)

“Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward,” asked Gross. “I’ll make it worse,” answered Hersh, adding that he believes Cheney “put people back” in government to “stay behind” in order to “tell him what’s going on” and perhaps even “do sabotage”:

HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.

[Civilization2]

27. yup,. just look at the difference in the crowds in Germany,. so telling!

People expected some CHANGE to come from the HOPE,. the only change has been the making permanent what Bush had created only temporarily,. and then its expansion. (drone murders, spy-fest, bankster free-for-all, etc.)

[Quantess]

31. Well, we did get Obamacare / Affordable health care act, so there's that.

But of course the rest of the world is not effected by our health care policies, so Germans and others around the world don't really care about that.

All those things you mentioned above, however, affect the whole world.

(edit typos)

[Divernan]

34. Obama/Berlin: 200,000 in '08; 4,500 in '13 - 97.5% drop

That's a clear drop of 97.5% in popularity if you go by the folks-voting-with-their-feet. And I'm sure a sample of 200,000 is a helluva lot larger than whatever group Pew sampled.

(On edit: just looked up size of Pew samples: "Due to their use of proven sampling techniques, the local vendors we work with can achieve nationally representative surveys by conducting face-to-face surveys with about 1,000 respondents." http://www.pewresearch.org/2011/12/13/ask-the-expert-3/)

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/berlin-speech-200000-obama-2008-only-6000-today_736767.html

6,000 guests were "invited", as in here's-your-ticket, you-better-show-up to masses of civil servants. Even then, according to a pool reporter, only 4,500 of the "invited" actually showed up. In other words, the State Department couldn't GIVE those tickets away.

The stage for the president's speech is set up on the East side of the Brandenburg Gate, in the old East Berlin. The sun is pounding down and there are around 6,000 invited guests according to German authorities. There are bleachers set up either side of the square, with a big two storey riser facing the stage which has a row of bullet proof glass and 12 US, German and EU flags and the grand backdrop of the Gate. There is a large standing crowd between the bleachers.

Last time around, when Obama delivered a speech in Berlin in the 2008 presidential campaign, when he was still a senator, 200,000 folks came out to see him.
UPDATE: The pool reporter says only 4,500 were present for Obama's speech:
Crowd count at the Brandenburg Gate speech was 4,500 according to Elmar Jakobs

Obama's honeymoon with Germans has been over for some time. This next article, from June of 2012, i.e, predating the ultra Stasi program, PRISM, discusses that. The Pew studies distinguish between whether Germans like him personally, and if they approve of US actions.
Frustrations with Obama Mounting
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pew-survey-shows-germans-disillusioned-by-the-us-and-president-obama-a-838537.html

Germans were ecstatic when Barack Obama took over the keys to the White House from George W. Bush. Now, though, a new Pew Research Center survey shows that disillusionment with the US president is widespread in Germany and that Obama has not lived up to the high expectations Europeans had of him.

Moreover, there is grave German disappointment with Obama's handling of climate change. In 2009, the Pew Research Center asked Germans if they thought that the newly-elected president would get the US to take significant measures to control global climate change. At the time, 76 percent said he would. Now only 26 percent say he has. Only the French among Europeans had higher expectations. And only the French have been as disappointed.

Most notable, however, is the sizable gender gap in Germany on drone strikes. While 54 percent of German men approve of such activities, only 24 percent of women do. A male-female differential of that magnitude is rarely seen in public opinion.

Reality was unlikely to live up to these expectations. And it has not. The real global public opinion story as Obama heads into a re-election campaign may be just how long the Obama honeymoon with the Europeans, including the Germans, lasted. Nevertheless, this new survey suggests frustrations with Obama and the United States are mounting. And leaders in Berlin, Washington and elsewhere need to be cognizant of their implications, especially if the American people give Obama a second term.

[Savannahmann]

36. The policies of this administration look a lot like the policies of the last regime

That's the lesson that the world has learned, and is learning. There is little chance that the image of the arrogant Ugly American will ever change so long as we walk around beating our chests shouting at them to do what they're told or else. The attitude of we know what is best for all should have died out a century before, sadly it hasn't.

[treestar]

38. Doesn't matter much, really

Does it? They'll keep trading with us and wanting us to help them with their defense and national security.

We have wound down the wars. Oh and some countries were helping us with those.

Snowden is not a big enough deal. I know his supporters want him to be, but he's not.