Obama at Home in Prague

Politico is running a rather innocuous piece about how Barack Obama is making his mark on Prague, much in the way that Ronald Reagan got to know Iceland.

When he was born in 1961, Obama told the crowd, few people would have predicted someone like him would become president of the United States — just as few would have imagined that the Czech Republic would become a free, NATO-member country.   

“Those ideas would have been dismissed as dreams,” Obama said, against the backdrop of the picturesque St. Nicholas Church. “We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change.” (…)

Despite the distant and ceremonial feel of this trip compared with last year’s, Obama was equally as effusive in his praise of the Czechs.

“Let me begin by saying how happy I am to be back in the beautiful city of Prague,” he said in his remarks after signing the arms treaty. “I have great admiration and affection for the Czech people.”