Angele Merkel is traveling in the US this week and is fulfilling a girlhood dream of visiting California. Dirk Kurbjuweit in Der Speiegel has a perceptive article on the cool relationship between the German chancellor and President Obama:
But for Merkel, the hardest pill to swallow is that America, her
paradise, has brought her President Barack Obama. In the election, she
favored his opponent Hillary Clinton, out of "female solidarity."
Besides, Obama poses a threat to the view, so useful to Merkel, that
politics cannot be fun and inspiring.
Part of the problem here is that Germans do not completely understand the political realities in Washington today. Charisma can only go so far when the US Senate has become politically dysfunctional. Kurbjuweit writes:
Obama's approach to politics is more individualistic. He too is
dependent on an army of advisers, but when push comes to shove, his
will and charisma are crucial to making decisions happen. Merkel takes
a collectivist approach. She identifies the goals of other
participants, blends them with her own needs and turns the whole thing
into a fail-safe policy that allows her to remain popular.
The irony here is that Obama's instinct is to conciliate – just like Merkel. He honestly thought that he could achieve bipartisan consensus on tackling America's most intractable problems. David Remnick, in his brilliant new biography of Barack Obama (The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama) , writes about how from his days as a student at Harvard Law School Obama's impulse was to always try to reconcile or synthesize opposing views. That impulse has worked out well for Angela Merkel, but it is impossible in the US today, where the Rebublican opposition has only one mission – to block and defeat Barack Obama at every turn, regardless of the consequences for the American people.
