Europeans have disdain for Our Financial Crisis . . .

. . . but they want Barack Obama, who did nothing to prevent the crisis, to be our president.

The Berlin Wail
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Monday, September 22, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Allies: The reaction of Europeans to our financial crisis has been one of disdain as they sit in cafes assured of U.S. protection. But then they want Barack Obama, who did nothing to prevent the crisis, to be our president.

Read More: Election 2008 Europe & Central Asia

Europeans know a lot about bailouts. We bailed them out twice in the first half of the 20th century and spent most of the second half keeping the Soviets from marching to the English Channel. It's the U.S. that will save their backsides again in the war on terror. NATO is largely an American operation.

So it's with some amusement we hear Euro blowhards lecturing us on how to run the economy that made possible their freedom as well as ours.

An article in Saturday's Los Angeles Times quotes Hanna Evers, a cell phone retailer in Berlin. "I was taught that the USA was the motherland of moneymaking," she said. "And now all I see is a herd of headless chickens running around on Wall Street."

In Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper, Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti compared the current crisis to corruption-ridden Albania in 1997, when pyramid schemes cost hundreds of thousands people their savings and caused civil conflict. "It is not the failure of a bank, but the failure of a system," he opined.

"It has been a problem of greed," Eric Aeschimann wrote in the newspaper Liberation, a voice of French intellectuals with a long disdain for the capitalist system. He expressed longing for the "good old days when bankers jumped out of windows."

America will survive this crisis, as it did when it rose out of the Depression to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But it may not survive if Sen. Obama becomes the next president.

Obama shares the Europeans' faith in the nanny state, which uses socialist economics to redistribute income, not create wealth. Maybe that's why they like him so much.

A poll taken in 12 European countries shows people there have great faith in Obama for his big-government philosophy and for his goal of reining in American power. Forty-seven percent say relations would improve under Obama vs. 11% under McCain. Obama leads in favorability ratings, 69% to 26%. Only 33% favor us exerting "strong leadership" in world affairs.

So it's not surprising that Obama the rock star would feature Berlin on his 2008 world tour. A May-June Gallup poll found 62% of Germans want Obama elected president over just 27% who like John McCain.

A 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Survey found that 65% of Germans dislike American ideas about democracy, 64% dislike the American way of doing business and 87% have a negative view about the spread of American ideas. No wonder Obama felt at home in Berlin.

When Sen. McCain was fighting to forestall this economic crisis, Obama was doing nothing to support McCain's efforts. McCain backed the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Act of 2005 to thwart what he called "the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole."

Where was Sen. Obama? Busy raking in campaign contributions from those very same folks.

Based on data released electronically from the Federal Election Commission on Sept. 2: Including contributions to lawmakers' leadership PACs and candidate committees from PACs and employees of foundering Fran and Fred, Obama in his few short years in the Senate rose to No. 2, with $126,349 received, after veteran Democrat Chris Dodd of Connecticut.

McCain tries to prevent the crisis and is loathed in Europe. Obama profits from the crisis and is hailed.

As the Europeans might say, c'est la vie.