Obama, D-Ill., certainly will receive a hero's welcome: The broad consensus of European media pundits and the European public far prefers him to either current U.S. President George W. Bush or Republican presumptive presidential nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Obama is seen as a return to the "good" America of President Bill Clinton and, for that matter, of his predecessors George Herbert Walker Bush and even Ronald Reagan, who treated European leaders seriously, took their input on board, and did not launch unilateral major wars while brushing the Europeans off.

The so-called Big Three -- although, in terms of ratings, Fox News is bigger -- American TV network anchors are also taking the unprecedented step of accompanying Obama on his trip -- an honor they never afforded McCain when he visited Mexico and Colombia earlier this month or when he traveled to Europe and Israel earlier this year.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is collapsing in the polls because of the British public's perception that he lacks the backbone and guts to push through any effective policy, will certainly be eager to grab at Obama's coattails and give him unquestioning support in whatever he does.

It is now 67 years since U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill inaugurated the modern Special Relationship of British and American leaders when they met at sea off Newfoundland and signed the Atlantic Charter. But British leaders still measure their national credibility on foreign affairs and defense, above all on how closely they are associated with the president of the United States, and Brown's advisers and handlers are convinced the next one will be Obama.

However, Obama will have a far rockier road in dealing personally with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and, above all, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The French president takes the threat of thermonuclear attack from Iran seriously and is a strong supporter of Bush's plans to deploy 10 Ground-based Midcourse Interceptors in Central Europe to shoot down any Iranian missiles that may be aimed at the United States -- or at France and other nations in Western Europe, too.

But Obama is in full accord with Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress in wanting to pull the plug on funding for those bases.

Also, French officials have been leaking their alarm to both European and American journalists over the past month that Obama may "give away the farm" to Iran by undercutting European cooperation with the United States on imposing economic sanctions on the domestically challenged government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Obama already has gotten off on the wrong foot with Merkel: As a devoted admirer of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, he wanted to give a keynote speech in Berlin as JFK famously did, and he even wanted to echo Republican President Ronald Reagan by speaking in front of the Brandenburg Gate in the center of the German capital.

However, Kennedy and Reagan were both already presidents of the United States and seasoned world leaders who had taken great risks and achieved great triumphs in defending America's allies in Western Europe from the Soviet threat when they gave those historic addresses. Obama is still just a domestic American politician and a presidential wanna-be, though one with a better than 50-50 chance of getting there.

Merkel, who grew up in East Germany and takes the credentials of established leaders in opposing communism and other forms of tyranny extremely seriously, is reported to have vetoed the Brandenburg Gate speech proposal. Obama will now have to work overtime to impress her on his seriousness of purpose.

On the surface, the European section of Obama's Grand Tour does not carry as many potential pitfalls as his later progress through Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict certainly will. But it has plenty of political risks of its own. It looks very likely to play as a rose-tinted triumphal progress through the uncritical cameras of the U.S. network anchors. But what European leaders make of it behind their public smiles and open arms may be another story entirely.