Am I the only person who feels like Rip Van Winkle today? I come out West for a few days, and awake on this glorious Montana morning... to find that somehow I’ve missed the 2008 election! Barack Obama, apparently, is already president of the United States. The Nation magazine's political blog pronounces Obama a “respected commander-in-chief” and a “credible world leader.” A German news outlet, Der Spiegel, isn’t content merely to anoint Barack as the 44^th American president, but as “president of the world.”

If this is good or bad, I don’t know—it’s pretty early in the presidency of Forty-four to tell. I vaguely remember a dude named McCain, although the television news networks don’t. He struck me as an honest and brave man. Wonder what he’s doing these days. As for the new president, he’s certainly a handsome and inspiring fellow, isn't he? In Berlin, where America’s other favorite post-war presidents have given big-time speeches, he spoke about world harmony, pausing long enough to ask his German hosts to muster some troops to help us out in Afghanistan. Way to go, Prez.

In our partisan times, the commentariat has already split along its normal lines in the new president’s tenure. Liberal writer John Nichols gave Obama’s trip boffo reviews, kicking McCain in the ribs for good measure. (Nichols said McCain had “dared” Obama to take a world tour, which wasn’t quite right—McCain dared Obama to go to Iraq.)

Meanwhile, the conservative punditry is not giving Forty-four much of a honeymoon. David Brooks grouses that President Obama’s apparent desire for the world to spontaneously break into Kumbaya is hardly reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”  —and ain’t even in the same ballpark as John F. Kennedy’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech. If you don't want to click on that link, here's an excerpt from JFK's famous address:

There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress…  Let them come to Berlin.

Are these different times than the Sixties or the Eighties? Sure, but having a candidate travel abroad as the presumptive President-elect before he’s been formally nominated is a strange new wrinkle. Not to belabor the point, but Kennedy and Reagan had been inaugurated when they went to Berlin.

It brings to mind a little incident that happened days before Election Day in 1980. Reagan was doing a rally at a high school in Charlottesville, Va. when the band inexplicably broke into Hail to the Chief. A CBS network correspondent in the White House pool, speaking loudly to be heard over the blaring music, intoned, “Pretty frigging presumptuous, if you ask me!” He spoke just as the band stopped and his words echoed over the football field on that crisp October night. Nancy Reagan glared at him, and his media colleagues laughed at him. In 2008, they aren’t laughing, they are humming along with the tune.