Maureen DowdIn the French imagination, Barack Obama is already the president.
To the French, the Democratic primary was the general election.
The word “elite” is not a pejorative here; it’s a compliment. It does not occur to Parisians that Americans will choose the old, white-haired one if they can have the cool, skinny one with the Ray-Bans, John le Carré novels, chic wife and secret cigarettes.
Newsstands carry a whole magazine devoted to “La révolution OBAMA.” The papers are avidly following Obama’s post-Hillary quest to “cherche les femmes,” and on Friday, Le Figaro led with the headline that he had widened his lead over his “rival républicain.”
There was nothing on Le Figaro’s front page about that other American guy who was over here, munching on langoustes at the Élysée Palace with Sarko and the seductress Carla (animated and dazzling with a midnight blue dress and a hopelessly long, thin cigarette).
“You kind of wrote my political obituary tonight,” W. teased the French president after Sarko’s toast Friday night, adding that he still has six months left and a lot of work to do.
In Old Europe, they’ve moved on, assuming that the American president has done all the damage that he can do. The blazing hostility toward W. has faded to indifference and a sort of fatigued perplexity about how les imbeciles de regime cowboy got into office, and how America could have put the world through all this craziness.
Even as the Supreme Court slapped him back for the third time on the suffocation of civil liberties at Guantánamo, President Bush gave the keynote speech of his European farewell tour extolling the virtues of liberty. He celebrated European unity at the very instant it was falling apart, thanks to an Irish donnybrook.
Paris responded with a yawn. (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.) A Bush organizer asked people sitting in the back of the hall to move to the front, so the empty seats would not be visible on TV. The image of the U.S. abroad has improved slightly, according to a new Pew poll, but only in anticipation of seeing the back of this president.
In a way, W. is very different from the cocky, know-nothing, chip-on-his-shoulder “Bully Bush” I followed on his maiden European tour in 2002. His disdain for Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, and theirs for him, was bristlingly clear. He told the bemused French that he’d heard tell from Jacques about their “fantastic food,” and he lectured the bewildered Germans, as though they were thick on the subject, that Saddam was evil because he “gassed his own people.”
This time, he left the heavy lifting on Afghanistan to the more popular Laura Bush, while he hung out with French, German and Italian leaders he likes. “Your Eminence,” he told the pope, “you’re looking good.” Angela Merkel dodged when asked at a press conference whether she would miss W., but said she liked being able to “call a spade a spade with him.” He enthused that “German asparagus are fabulous,” and wryly told a Paris audience that “my hair is a lot grayer,” assuming that the French, with their history of foiled colonialism, would know why. He seemed, all these years later, intent on spiritual absolution. ... ( more )
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