For most of his big Berlin speech, Barack Obama was the anti-Bush.

His critique of the current President was only thinly veiled.

“I know my country has not perfected itself,” he said. “We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.”

And he asked: “Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law?”

On global warming, he said, “We must come together to save this planet.” He added: “Let us resolve that all nations—including my own—will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your own, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere.”

Even on free trade, he put some distance between himself and Bush, as well as McCain. He endorsed “open markets” but argued: “We must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet.” So he called for trade that was “free and fair for all.”

He also, from the very beginning, showed that he viewed himself not only as an American but as “a fellow citizen of the world.” He talked about “global citizenship” and “common humanity.”

In perhaps the most moving passage of his speech, he asked: “Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity, by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time? Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words ‘never again’ in Darfur?’ ”

And he spoke out, in very un-Bush ways, for “a world without nuclear weapons.”

Yet for all the differences he drew with Bush, there were some rhetorical and substantive similarities.

“We are called upon again,” Obama said, stealing a phrase that Bush likes to use in his most messianic moments. Like Bush, Obama talked repeatedly about “our shared destiny,” as if it’s preordained.

Even as he mentioned bringing the Iraq War to a close, he foreshadowed an open-ended one in Afghanistan. “We have too much at stake to turn back now,” he said. And he said, “No one welcomes war,” a phrase that every warmonger invokes.

He talked about “a new dawn” in the Middle East, but he left no indication in his speech or in his visit to Israel and Palestine that he’s prepared to do what’s necessary to bring it about: especially in pressuring Israel to come to a just settlement with the Palestinians.

And while he said “we must reject the Cold War mindset of the past,” he harped on the Cold War over and over again, a coda that could only have discomfited Moscow even as Obama’s revisionism glossed over the dangerous part that America played in that era.

At the end, trying to wrap himself in the mantle of JFK while giving a subtle dig to McCain, Obama talked about the role of the “new generation—our generation” to “make our mark on history.”

Just how different that mark would be was hard to tell from Obama’s speech.