A Comparison of Bush and Obama

As Obama spoke to over 100,000 cheering people recently in Berlin, I couldn't help remember what happened when President Bush spoke in Germany. A couple days before I arrived in Germany in 2005, Bush had visited. Though I didn't hear much about it in the US, once I got to Germany, I heard that thousands of people showed up to protest his official visit. I have a feeling that these protests were only minimally covered in the American media as I spent some time searching and had a difficult time finding an article about it in English. As reported in the German magazine Spiegel, about 12,000 people protested to show their displeasure with the American president. Turns out that Germans have built a tradition of protesting Bush on every visit he made over the last six years (article in English), until his visit this past June, when the Germans gave up. American foreign relations has come a long way in the last few months.