Bush Continues To Embarrass America, This Time As McCain's Wingman

Looks like George W. Bush is doing everything he can to prevent Barack Obama's election. Last week we noted the rather coincidental timing of the hostage rescue in Colombia, coming the same day as John McCain's visit to that country. Couldn't have anything to do with the Bush/McCain policy on Colombian free trade, as opposed to Obama's more skeptical stance, could it?

And now an even more explosive story. As you may have heard, Barack Obama's campaign has been considering staging a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin during his upcoming world tour. The campaign has had the full support of Berlin's mayor, the Germany ambassador to Washington (who lobbied for the idea), and Germany's Foreign Ministry.

Everything was going along smoothly. Until last week. I'll let pserick take over from there:

But then, out of nowhere, either on July 6th or July 7th, the German Chancellor's office leaked its sudden disapproval to the press, calling into question not only the choice of the Brandenburg Gate but also whether it was appropriate at all for a candidate to campaign abroad --- even after the German ambassador's efforts to secure a public event.

The Chancellor insisted that the Brandenburg Gate has "only been used on special occasions for political events, and until now has only been offered to elected presidents."

Let's leave aside for a moment that the Dalai Lama, hardly an elected head of state, spoke to a cheering crowd of 25,000 before the Brandenburg Gate less than six weeks ago.

Leaving aside that other German political leaders, from various political parties, including the Chancellor's own center-right CDU, were puzzled and even laughed at her sudden insistence on the sacrosanctness of the Gate.

Leaving aside that the Gate is used for countless public carnivals, topless "Love Parades," and a couple weeks ago played host to 600,000 drunken sports fans watching the European soccer championship on jumbo screens.

Leaving aside that Chancellor Angela Merkel herself visited Bush in Washington in 2003 --- two and a half years before she became Chancellor. "Merkel knows," the Berlin mayor snorted today, "how to campaign in foreign countries." And: "She shouldn't throw any stones while sitting in a glass house."

Leaving all that aside, the questions remains:

Why now? What happened on July 7th?

The opening of the G-8 Summit in Japan.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (roughly the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal) reported that an irritated Bush administration staffer approached the Chancellor's foreign policy adviser Christoph Heusgen during the G-8 Summit and expressed his disapproval. The phrase used in the article is "angeblafft," or "snapped at."

In the following days, the Bush administration made its bitterness even more apparent:

Indeed, Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt told the mass circulation tabloid Bild that "it would be nice if the German government would focus on strengthening its contacts to us rather than already beginning to look for our successors."

The Chancellor's office immediately complied, choosing not to address its concerns privately to the Obama campaign but to publicly leak its disapproval --- committing an embarrassing diplomatic faux pas that now risks Germany's future relationship with someone who could be president of the United States.

Others, including Ben Smith at Politico, are starting to notice:

If this happened -- Bush's team thought a European government wouldn't leak it -- they were crazy. Seems remarkably ham-handed, and meddling on McCain's behalf in Europe seems pretty ill-advised.

I'm sure George W. Bush doesn't like the fact that Barack Obama is already more popular in Europe than he ever was, and doesn't want to see a liberal Democrat get the kind of overseas reception that he never had -- even before becoming President.

Interesting to see how this all plays out. If Germany is going to bow to Bush's demands, I'd simply stage the speech in Paris, London, Tel Aviv or -- and I know this is out of left field -- Baghdad instead.