I'm rather unimpressed by the hype around Nikolas Sarkozy. For the reformer hype, his platform promises to preserve the most significant and idiosyncratic aspects of the French welfare state, and his pro-Americanism doesn't seem to have much weight either. The bitter enmity with France, remember, is over Iraq, not snootiness. So though he is, as The New York Times breathlessly reports, "a man who openly proclaims his love of Ernest Hemingway, Steve McQueen and Sylvester Stallone and his admiration for America’s strong work ethic and its belief in upward mobility," he's manifestly not someone who's going to deploy 35,000 French troops to Baghdad.
Indeed, it's testament to how far we've fallen, both in the eyes of the international community and in our own expectations, that we're gleeful over the ascendance of a foreign leader who simply refrains from projecting loathing and contempt towards us. Sarkozy's initial message to America was that "France will always be by their side when they need her, but that friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently.” Now, if we're actually going to embrace this concept, and agree that allies are allies even if they don't support dunderhead foreign interventions, that's all for the good. But these right wingers currently waltzing around the rafters on a Sarkozy-high may want to rethink things. He may -- or may not -- be, as Newt Gingrich says, “the candidate of change,” but he is not the candidate who would have fallen in line behind our unilateralism and hawkishness,
