The first public warning was a scratchy cough, broadcast live to the world, followed by a request for water. In the gilded British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the President of the United States finally stood on a global stage, a new leader introducing a new American vision for the world. But he sounded a bit off, his voice pitched, parched, nasal. At the start of his first overseas trip as President, Barack Obama had come down with a cold.
Over the next eight days, Obama would have to visit six countries, attend three international summits, conduct scheduled meetings with 25 world leaders and deliver public remarks at least 22 times, including five press conferences and two student-filled town halls. He would be asked to personally broker a new global economic compact and the unanimous appointment of a new NATO Secretary-General and to make time for a rain-soaked meeting in Istanbul with foreign ministers from Turkey and Armenia at which the stakes were merely to build a rapprochement after a nearly century-old genocide.
But through the endless processions, photo ops and briefings, Obama’s warmth rose above his cold. He grabbed throat lozenges for the motorcades. His staff began stocking his podiums with glasses of water. Behind the scenes, the White House medical unit was surely lending a hand too. At every stage, the President gave essay-length answers to even the wonkiest theoretical questions, though his eyes sometimes hung heavy with dark sags. By the time he made it to Ankara, on Day 7, he was mocking his own illness, reveling in a sort of victory. “In London, I sounded like I had acorns up my nose,” he reported, exiting the office of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
If anything, Obama seemed energized by the challenges–political and immunological–before him. It was in many ways an opportunity he had been waiting for all his life, a chance to apply on a global stage the lessons he learned as a community organizer in the 1980s. “We are stronger when we act together,” he told the Turkish parliament and military on April 6, returning to the theme that defined his visit. At every stop, he delivered this message, offering collaboration and partnership instead of demands of the kind that marked the Bush era. At a press conference in Baden-Baden with Germany’s Angela Merkel, a reporter asked Obama what his “grand designs” were for NATO. “I don’t come bearing grand designs,” he said. “I’m here to listen.”
A lot of what he heard was adoration. Crowds lined the route of Obama’s motorcade in London. Members of the foreign press twice applauded after Obama’s press conferences, and the streets of Prague had been graffitied with a stenciled Obama portrait. The excitable French President Nicolas Sarkozy pronounced it “a hell of a good piece of news” that Obama understood that “the world does not boil down to simply American frontiers and borders.”
As a practical matter, though, it was not so clear that the more collaborative strategy that Obama was peddling would pay immediate dividends. In London, European leaders balked at any specific commitment to future economic stimulus on par with American plans. In Strasbourg, NATO countries offered rhetorical support for Obama’s new Afghan strategy but few combat troops to support the effort. The North Korean missile launch yielded no immediate condemnation from the U.N. Security Council, another illustration of the limits of consensus.
And yet Obama showed no signs of frustration. If anything, he managed a mix of realism and exuberance. During a town hall with Turkish students on the final day of his trip, Obama said of promoting peace and prosperity, “Words are good and understanding is good, but ultimately it has to translate into concrete actions … These things take time, and the idea is that you lay the groundwork and slowly, over time, if you make small efforts, they can add up into big efforts.”
Minutes later, he ended the event as he had almost every other appearance, with a question that didn’t need an answer: “All right?” Which meant that he had more to do and little time, and he couldn’t afford to let anything hold him back.
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