Obama practices politics in Europe in the same way that he does in the United States. He even says at much. He responded to a question at his town hall meeting in Strasbourg by saying that meeting with the G-20 was like politics back home in America: much wheeling and dealing, leaders of nations playing to the people back home. He might have added that there was nothing wrong with that; indeed, logrolling is part of what democratic legislatures do, while separate deals based on corruption, every courtier caddoodling separately with the authoritarian leader, is what happens in Saudi Arabia and what happened in Louis XIV’s France.

But Obama was professorial enough, and used that to his advantage, by answering the questions that the students (that’s what most of them in Strasbourg were) have in mind rather than the ones they had badly formulated. So when asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism, the student may have had in mind that this was a polite way to ask whether the Bush doctrine that it was America’s role, ordained by God, to lead the way for the world, was now over. Such a query was possibly based on a careful reading of what American journalists had said about the Bush administration. Obama, quick on his feet, replied that all nations think themselves exceptional, thereby disarming the term, and then went on to address the gravamen of the question by admitting that the United States had been on occasion arrogant, but that there was a strain of anti-Americanism in Europe which was widespread and insidious and that did not properly appreciate what the United States had done for Europe. That, I thought, was pretty tough talk and of the sort that those like me who think that America bashing by Europeans is the snobbish condescension of people who can’t clean up their own messes, but expect Americans to do all the heavy lifting, whether in the Balkans or in Afghanistan. The World Trade Center may have been in the United States, but Madrid and London and Hamburg are in Europe.

Obama’s charm, some pundits have said, allowed him to win over the crowds and become a rock idol, but that did not translate into substantive achievements. What did he have to show for his trip? He didn’t get many NATO troops for the Afghanistan war, and the rules of coordination to still go through national headquarters back home in the capitals of Europe rather than through the on the ground military command. It is not the same with other nations as it was with the British in the Persian Gulf War, their commander simply telling Franks that the contingent was at his disposal in whatever way he wanted to use them for as long as he wanted them. That is an alliance. I hope a time comes when German troops do not have to be so sensitive about whether they commit battlefield atrocities. Also, Obama didn’t get a stimulus package, again a concession to German cultural fears about runaway inflation.

Obama operates by not pressing too hard about what he does not think he can get and describing only the general outlines of what he wants. That way he gets substantially what he wants, what he think it is reasonable to get. That has been the strategy that won him success at home. He got his legislation through by allowing Nancy and Harry to write it and trimming what couldn’t be sold. And so his list of legislative and administrative accomplishments is already extraordinary, even though he will probably have to write off health reform and cap and trade for this year. He also moved aside the people in charge of Fanny Mae and Fanny Mac without announcing it, and then got rid of Rick Waggoner in a very public way because he thought that was the right way to appease the public.

The same strategy worked on for his European trip. He gave in on his request for a European stimulus package and got what was probably more important, which is aid to undeveloped countries and greater transparency in banking arrangements, while holding the line against an international currency. He got support for tighter bank regulation which he favored anyway. That was in London. In Strasbourg, he welcomed Croatia and Albania to the NATO fold while pointedly not mentioning Belarus and Ukraine, and so upending a Bush promise that would have created the greatest confrontation with Russia since the Cold War. He got NATO to accept his new goals for the Afghani war, and was candid in his defense of those goals, saying that whatever our objections to the cultural mores of parts of Afghanistan, the point of the war is to fight Al Qaeda. He did not say much about Pakistan, nor should he have, because there he lets our drone warfare do our talking for us. When in Prague, he said more artfully than I can that he was willing to trade away missiles in the Czech Republic for Russian help on Iran, and he had Holbrooke no longer treat the Iranians as pariahs. It was, all told, a nice bit of work on a number of fronts. Henry Kissinger said on Charlie Rose last night that Obama got from Europe all he could have expected to get. I take that to be, from Kissinger, a considerable compliment. Kissinger warned, though, that tougher confrontations were ahead, which is true enough, and something of which the Obamaites are well aware. They just hope, I suspect, that a major international crisis will not occur for six months or so, by which time the domestic economic program will have been put in place.

Yes, Obama does engage in some pat formulas left over from the past. He talks about resolving the Israeli Palestinian sixty year crisis as if that is a matter of how much hard work and attention we put into it, though he talks less about a two state solution than some resolution. He may not be too far from Netanyahu’s position that a two state solution is dead, not that it ever had much chance of succeeding. Obama reserves his old fashioned liberal positions mostly, though, for American domestic matters. I think he may well believe the platitudes he says about education, reflecting the general view of the reform movement that the key to improving education is improving teachers by, in part, providing them with financial incentives and a better testing regime to evaluate what they have contributed to the success of their students. And certainly replacing school buildings that are 160 years old is not a bad idea. But that is not the way to compete with the Chinese in Math and Science. The way to do that is the way we are already doing it: employ expatriate Chinese mathematicians and scientists and train the children of recent Asian and Russian immigrants. That is the way the United States has always filled its science gap: it imports people. Then it makes no difference if the students in Texas and Kansas high schools are largely scientifically illiterate.

Obama has an enormous amount of stuff on his plate and I don’t expect he will learn the nuances of education and health policy any time soon. But meanwhile, I am losing my usual skeptical stance and becoming something of a fan. I felt this way about JFK, and that was a mistake, and about no one since. It is nice to have someone of the stature of the two Roosevelts in the White House again. I was skeptical of Obama, as many earlier dispatches in this blog attest, because he was so inexperienced. No one not already comfortable with Washington or at least executive leadership of a significant sort (a long term governor, like Clinton, or military experience, as was the case with Eisenhower) could successfully negotiate the terrain. You have to look as far back as Lincoln to find a similarly untested figure settling into the Oval Office as if this were his natural setting. I blanch at the outrageousness of a comparison I am now inclined to make.