mr obama, back in your box

Barack Obama is rumoured to planning a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate during his trip to Germany, in self-conscious reference to Reagan's famous '"Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall" address. Obama wants to be seen as a kind of liberal Reagan: a truly transformational candidate, ready to take America into the next chapter of its history, and a figure who can bring the country together.

Audacious, heavily symbolic gestures like this make me queasy (Gordon Brown did something similar, on a smaller scale, and look how that worked out). It's the kind of thing that can seem brilliant when cooked up at a strategy meeting, and genius when it's actually executed. But if things start to go wrong afterwards, for whatever reason, it's the first thing critics will point to and shout "hubris"!

Just ask Karl Rove.