Well, Goodwin...here we come...
CdC, I'm sure you are familiar with Jesse Owens. If you are not then look him up. Germany did everything they could to marginalise blacks, jews, gypsies, gays, and anybody else who did not fit in the Aryan Christian mould.
At the time mainstream America also looked down on many of those groups. A perfect example is the Tuskeegee airmen who had to work x-times as hard to get the same respect as white pilots. America did not set out to exterminate those groups, so if America is compared to Germany in the '40s we compare favourably, but because we did not treat minorities as equals we do not rate perfectly in that comparison.
In 1954 things were better, but still not perfect. And being an Aryan looking guy myself I have never been on the receiving end of the sort of racism that Obama has probably had to deal with. In the movie 'We Were Soldiers' there is a segment where all the wives are sitting around discussing how to get things done, and one of the more naive women asks where the others do the rest of their laundry because the laundromat she goes to will only do t-shirts, socks, and briefs. They look at her with a puzzled expression, and she explains that the laundromat has a sign in the window that says 'No Coloureds'. They all immediately look at the wife of one of the soldiers (she is black) and everything gets very uncomfortable. Now I was too young to remember anything like that, but that was late '60s, and I have certainly seen pictures.
Fast forward to today - now the bad guys are Muslims and gays, though there are still people who are holding on to older prejudices, as evidenced by the two who were caught planning to kill Obama as a cap to a killing spree of blacks.
So if Obama compares the US and Germany in WW2 it is not that he is trying to emulate Germany. That would be suicidal, and I really doubt that is his goal. Sounds to me like he would be trying to do what he can to fix a problem that he would most likely be a lot more personal to him than to either one of us. Maybe you would be better off calling him a Tuskeegee airman as he seems to want to fight racism at home.
Steve