As we hope you may notice during your brief visit to Copenhagen, the Danish people as a whole warmly welcomes you here, as well as the First Lady, Michelle Obama.

We know that you did not come here to visit Denmark, but to support your home city of Chicago in its bid for the 2016 Olympic Games.

Great sympathy for you efforts
Many thousands of Danes have read your fascinating and moving book ’Dreams from My father’, in which you describe your years as a community worker in Chicago.

They will have great sympathy for your efforts to secure that great event for a city so rich in diversity and vibrant with life.

If Chicago wins the prize, it will clearly owe it to your efforts and to your stature.

Brazil deserves to win
However, President Lula of Brazil, who has done so much to combine economic growth and social justice in his country, is also in town. He will argue as passionately as you for another great city, Rio de Janeiro.

Latin America has never hosted the Olympic Games, and to be honest, we think the preponderance of arguments is in favour of Rio. Brazil deserves recognition for the great strides it has made in recent years, both democratically and economically.

It seems to us that the Games would do even more for Rio than they might do for Chicago, and that Brazil deserves them even more than the United States.

It may be that your enormous personal prestige will carry the day at the IOC later today. If so, Chicago will celebrate, and we will look forward to a great show on the shores of Lake Michigan in the summer of 2016, where we confidently expect you to greet the world in the final year of your second term.

Admiration and enormous expectations
We hope to see you back in Copenhagen soon, and if at all possible for the Climate Conference this December, although we are of course aware of the difficulties you face on this issue in the United States Senate.

Finally, allow us to express our candid admiration for the long list of hopeful and creative policy initiatives you have taken in your first year as leader of the most powerful democracy in the world.

Above all, we deeply appreciate the basic philosophy which underlies your already historic presidency: At home as well as abroad, let us be united by our similarities, rather than divided by our differences.

Your election created enormous expectations, and with boldness as well as prudence, you are moving forward with wisdom and deliberate speed.

Yours respectfully
Politiken