Farewell to Superman

The Germans still love Barack Obama. According to polls they love him so much that a large majority would elect him chancellor without hesitation. Angela Merkel would have no chance. What causes this persistent devotion that gives the U.S. president an almost god-like status?

Obama is a politician with a mastery of creating visions of a better world through the spoken word — like he did in his Prague speech with the vision of a planet without nuclear weapons. He works with a self-assurance bordering on arrogance, which has created an extreme amount of hopes that cannot be fulfilled in reality.

Only slowly are many U.S. citizens beginning to realize: Obama is not the messiah he projected himself to be, nor is he a political superman. He is an ordinary politician who owed his rise above all to his rhetoric and the fatigue of the voters at the end of the Bush era. Obama has not only, as many before him, broken parts of his campaign promises — from the closure of Guantanamo to more transparency in his decisions. He and his government now also operate on legally extremely questionable terrain, be it in the pursuit of inconvenient journalists, the tolerance of the spying on millions of people by the U.S. intelligence community, the killing of suspected and often nameless “enemies of the state” through drones or the harassment of political dissents through the tax and judicial authorities.

Foreign policy outcomes are also sobering. There is no peaceful solution in sight in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Iran is continuing its efforts to join the ranks of the nuclear weapon states. And the reputation of the U.S. in the Muslim world remains poor despite Obama’s efforts.