Barack Obama with German chancellor Angela Merkel in front of the Reichstag in Berlin on July 24.

If Germans could vote for president of the United States, Barack Obama would win in a landslide. “He will be in Berlin this Thursday, when Germans will hail him as a magician with the ability to transform a gloomy world into a brighter place,” says Der Spiegel, the most respected news magazine in Germany. “Never before has there been so much excitement in Germany over the visit of a presumed US presidential candidate,” adds Spiegel. “Obama may be running for the White House, but judging by the commotion, one would think that he had already advanced two steps further and were the president of the world,” says Spiegel, which calls Obama ‘An American Idol in Germany.’

Of course, Barack Obama is still only the junior senator from Illinois and not yet even formally nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, but “Mr. Obama may well be the first American presidential candidate to deliver a speech in Berlin,” as Jeff Zeleny notes in the New York Times politics blog, The Caucus.

The German enthusiasm for the Democratic presidential candidate is hardly surprising, given the low regard in which George W. Bush is held in Mitteleuropa. In Germany, Bush is reviled as an ideologue and an imperialist who launched a disastrous war in Iraq and plunged US relations with European allies to their lowest point in decades. With Republican presidential nominee John McCain viewed by Germans as offering more continuity than change, Germans are hoping his Democratic rival replaces the Dummkopf who has occupied the White House for nearly eight years now.

But downing some beer and bratwurst with Angela Merkel is not only good trans-Atlantic politics, it is also good politics for a presidential candidate such as Barack Obama, given the deep connections between Germany and America. “Often overlooked is just how German the United States really is,” says Nicholas Kulish on The Caucus page of the Times, pointing out that nearly 43 million Americans are of German descent, many of them in key battleground states in the Midwest, such as Wisconsin, which is 43% German American.

Munich’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung calls today ‘Obama-Day in Berlin.’ Deutschland has succumbed to Obama mania. The question is, will Mittelamerika demonstrate the same Obama mania in November…?