YOU MEAN HE WAS SERIOUS?:

Naked Aggression (New York Sun Staff Editorial, August 8, 2007)

It seems the Parisian elite, for whom cynicism is a second nature, mistook their man: they assumed that, like the rest of their politicians, Mr. Sarkozy did not mean a word he said. His admiration for "les Anglo-Saxons" was naiveté. They ignored the fact that he held an election rally in London, aimed at the hundreds of thousands of ambitious French voters who have emigrated there to escape the dead hand of the French state.

The irony is not lost on Mr. Sarkozy that his Hungarian father once fled to France to escape socialism. The elites put his refusal to adopt the explicitly anti-Israel (and implicitly anti-Semitic) rhetoric of French politics down to the fact that his maternal grandfather was born Jewish. And they waited for their eccentric president to drop his "American" habit of jogging daily and for France to go back to self-satisfied normality.

Well, zut alors. It seems that Mr. Sarkozy hasn't stopped jogging, and it is dawning on the French political class that things are never going to be quite the same again. Mr. Sarkozy hates the hypocrisy that requires public denunciations of America by people who privately enjoy many things about it. "There are 900,000 French who come to America every year," he said this week. "And I am just one of them."

Mr. Sarkozy is not just here for pleasure, though. Later this week he will visit President Bush at Kennebunkport, where no doubt they will tuck into the finest seafood this side of the Taillevent. The French president's attempt to reconnect with a leader whose recent demonization in France recalls that of FDR by the Vichy regime will enrage the bien pensants in Paris even more than the Elvis Presley songs on the presidential iPod.