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Barack Obama, already hailed as a political Messiah by the German press, tonight took the US presidential campaign to Europe with a thunderously applauded speech promising a better, more sensitive America and urging a new global partnership.

The rally in front of Berlin's Victory Column was by the standards of post 9/11 political campaigning remarkably open, a veritable carnival as some 200,000 German Obama fans frequently interrupted his foreign policy speech with cheers and shouts of Pres-i-dent!

If the intended message was to show American voters that he could restore the tarnished image of the US abroad, then the rally - the only such event in his overseas tour - succeeded. Young girls dyed their hair red, white and blue, hand-scrawled placards declaring" President B.O" - most banners were removed by security guards - were held aloft and a few enthusiasts hung vertigously from the lampposts first erected by Nazi town planner Albert Speer.

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Initially the Senator appeared more nervous than at any of his other pitstops in the Middle East or Afghanistan. Dwarfed by the 70 metre column, he gave a tight smile and a somewhat limp wave. But the rhetoric soon took over: "People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment, this is our time"

The Germans had endowed the visit with almost supernatural significance - proud too that the would-be President seemed to have given Germany more weight than either Paris or London - and were waiting for a JF Kennedy moment. In a visit to West Berlin in 1963 Kennedy expressed his solidaity with the city by shouting out in German: "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

That moment never came. Instead, he made Berlin into a metaphor for the Obama mission.

"This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom," he said.

The Allied airlift 60 years ago had demonstrated the Western committment to defend its values, to hold firm against Communism. As a result of a common front the Berlin Wall had eventually come tumbling down. Now it was time he said to re-cast Western solidarity.

For those in the crowd listening carefully there were hints of a future steeliness: he called for more European participation in the anti terror campaign, more troops to Afghanistan. Under a monument commemorating Prussian military triumphs in the 19th century, a column that is partly propped up by captured canons, he signalled that a President Obama would want Germans on the front.

"The Afghan people need our troops and your troops," he said,"our support and your support to defeat the Taleban and al Qaeda."

That, he said, was the essence of the new transatlantic relationship. And it could be justified by self-interest in a globalised world:" The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin."

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