The Good American and Monsieur Obama

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Op-Ed Columnist
The Good American and Monsieur Obama
By ROGER COHEN
Published: June 9, 2008

PARIS

The French have always cherished a class of people called “les bons Américains.” These good Americans were those truest to a Gallic idea of what the United States should be, and in recent years those at the furthest remove from the aberrant folk who elected George W. Bush....

(R)ight now, in French eyes, there’s a single good American: the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, Barack Obama. His book, “The Audacity of Hope,” is a best seller. His face is everywhere, sometimes in socialist realist images evoking Che Guevara. An online support committee has drawn all-star support....Out in the troubled suburbs, with their large African and Arab populations and broad mistrust of a political system that has produced one black parliamentarian among the 555 representing mainland France, Obama is an urban legend. In France at least, he has high-low appeal....

Four years ago, with post 9/11 nationalist sentiment still running high, John Kerry had to hide the fact he spoke French and had French relatives. Republicans liked to mock the then Democratic candidate by suggesting he began rallies with a “Bonjour.” That anti-Gallic, freedom-fries fever has run its course. It’s exhausted, as are many of the jingoistic elements of the conservative, Republican wave that has been the dominant force in U.S. politics since Nixon.

The successful attack on Democrats that began in the 1960s with Nixon’s appeal to the “great silent majority of Americans” who abhorred anti-Vietnam agitators and glided into Bush’s vilification of egghead liberals short on Iraq testosterone, has exhausted itself. As George Packer notes in a must-read New Yorker piece called “The Fall of Conservatism,” the politically fruitful Republican-engineered polarization of politics around military might, family values and small government has died with Bush. “Polls,” Packer writes, “reveal that Americans favor the Democratic side on nearly every domestic issue, from Social Security and health care to education and the environment.”...

What I think this means for Obama is that French or European adulation for him is no longer a political problem. It cannot be associated by the likes of Karl Rove with wimpy Euro appeasement and “socialism.” If anything, Americans are looking to European health care and environmental measures as possible models. Still, the wave of international good will needs careful handling by the Obama campaign. For the providential “good American” can never be as good as the Gallic and global imagination would like. The silent Americans are still there; they are not as European as the French would wish....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/opinion/09cohen.html