According to this article, a town hall meeting was planned for George W. Bush's trip to Germany but it has been cancelled. The reason? Bush's crew was insisting that the questions be approved in advance so that no one would ask anything our Chief Exec did not want to answer…but the German reps insisted that an unscripted event had to really be unscripted.
If this were any other American president, I'd be skeptical of a report like this. But I recently watched a little of one of Bush's open forums in this country on C-Span, and the toughest question was along the lines of, "How do you manage to achieve such greatness?"
One of the most sacred principles of democracy is that elected officials are answerable to The People, and have to be prepared to answer the hard questions. Good to know this concept is alive and well…in Germany.