Over three days in the Middle East and Europe, President Obama began an ambitious recasting of politics and global perceptions – taking his case for a new beginning directly to the world's people.

The American president started with a nuanced bid for US-Muslim understanding and Mideast peace at the storied Cairo University – and ended in front of a soaring statue at the American cemetery at Omaha beach in Normandy titled, "The Spirit of American Youth, Rising from the Waves."

The trip, unusual in its limited time with state leaders in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Germany, and France – was a sweeping bid for the possibility of progress in long-intractable conflicts and standoffs, and a recasting of America's role in that effort. It was an appeal to reason, history, values, remembrance, and common aspirations of humanity, in a populist fashion rarely seen on the world stage, say diplomats and specialists.

"Obama is going over the heads of elites, attempting to establish moral legitimacy as a leader, turning popularity into policy," says Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "What we are seeing is not spin, but a sincere effort to reach out to hearts and minds, appealing to better instincts, to the reasonable nature of others. It is a revolutionary approach."

In Egypt, Obama set out to drain the poison in US-Muslim world relations in recent years, and backed a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, as well as an unambiguous freeze on settlement activity. On Saturday, at the Buchenwald concentration camp, with noted Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Obama reaffirmed America's core understanding of the historical event that led to the creation of the state of Israel. On Saturday, speaking to an ever smaller band of veteran brothers on the 65th anniversary of D-Day, he honored the sacrifice and the role of allies in the war against fascism that brought America fully onto the world stage in the mid-20th century.

Reaching hearts and minds in new fashion

Some diplomats say Obama's foreign policy tactics, similar to those used in the 2008 election campaign to create an improbable and popular grass-roots movement, are so new that they defy definition at this point. While the Bush administration began a strong emphasis on public diplomacy, Obama's own biography and experience seem to allow him to connect and build bridges that reach hearts and minds among ordinary people in a new fashion. A recent poll conducted in the US and major European countries by Harris International showed that the president was the most popular Western leader, with 70-80 percent seeing him as positive. Two separate polls of Arab public opinion in late May showed him as enjoying less support, but still viewed more favorably than US policy as a whole.

While discretion and privacy has long been a cardinal rule of diplomacy, some specialists say the degree of antipathy built in the Muslim world for both US policy and the image of America in the past decade has reached such a low point, that a new direct "fireside chat" with the Muslim world might help relations.

In Cairo, the US president set out the scope of the challenge, but also the reason for a different tact, stating: "We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any policy debate."

Later, he offered a promise of candor, saying that "As the Holy Koran tells us, 'Be conscious of God and speak always the truth,'" adding that "That is what I will try to do today, to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart."

'If you change the psychology, policy will follow'

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