Republican Video Mocks Obama's Visit to Berlin
July 30, 2008
The one-minute video, released on Tuesday, July 29, contains interviews with a few of the 200,000 people who attended Obama's speech in Berlin last week, suggesting his "international fan base" is unfit to judge who is best suited to be US president.
The ad is set to techno music and interspersed with images of US television star David Hasselhoff -- who succeeded as a musician in Germany but failed in the United States. It also ridicules Germans' leftist leanings.
"I have friends in America who are Marxists, and they support, are working for Obama," says one supposedly admiring fan of Obama in Berlin who appears in the ad. Another compares Obama to Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.
Video parodies German fans
The footage was posted on the Republican National Committee's (RNC) highlights on its YouTube channel. The video purports to be a parody of what a "Barack Obama in Berlin" television commercial might look like.
"Obama wasn't the only one filming his Berlin rally," RNC spokesman Alex Conant wrote in an e-mail to the Washington Post newspaper. "Like Obama, the RNC had a film crew there."
Obama returned Sunday from a week-long trip to Europe and the Middle East in an effort to boost his foreign policy credentials. Republican rival John McCain derided Obama's overseas visit as a "premature victory lap."