Obama the European

We already knew that he was Kenyan (through his father), Indonesian (through his mother, who took him there for several of his childhood years) and Muslim (thanks to Americans — nearly 20 percent of whom believe or claim that he is Muslim).

On the occasion of his week in Europe, Barack Obama has also become Irish, British and even Polish. In Ireland, O’Bama visited the village of his great-great-great-grandfather, recently discovered in his family tree. It was a subtle way of emphasizing to his domestic public that while he may be the “first black president,” he is also a real American, since he also has Irish blood.

In Great Britain, the second leg of his tour, the same Obama transformed himself, most unexpectedly, into a subject of Her Majesty, by presenting himself as “the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British Army.” In Poland, finally, as the Washington Post emphasized, he made himself Polish: “I am part of Poland because I come from Chicago,” he said. “And if you live in Chicago and you haven’t become a little bit Polish, then something’s wrong with you.”

All this is not going to be reassuring for Franco-American relations: France is the only stop on this European tour where the first globalized president of the United States did not report the least personal tie.