Roger Cohen has clearly been spending too much time in Europe. No intent here to begrudge the pleasures of The Continent, but one expects a foreign affairs columnist of the New York Times to be adequately grounded in the attitudes and realities of the American people in attempting to explain the world to an American audience. Writing Monday in the Times, dateline Paris, Cohen betrays a total lack of familiarity with the nuances of American politics, swept up as he is in European Obamania.
“Right now, in French eyes, there’s a single good American: the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, Barack Obama,” Cohen breathlessly reports. “His book, ‘The Audacity of Hope,’ is a best seller. His face is everywhere, sometimes in socialist realist images evoking Che Guevara.” We know we’re in for trouble when Cohen doesn’t bother to consider whether the French likening of Obama to a communist mass murderer is an indicator of good judgment on the part of the peoples whose opinions he holds in such high esteem. Nevertheless, “I think the French case says something particular about the state of American politics and global expectations,” Cohen admits, and continues to explain why this is the case.
Cohen writes that, “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.'” Now, Cohen declares, everything has apparently changed. “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.”
Cohen’s premise is wrong. John Kerry did not lose because of “freedom-fries fever” or the fact that he spoke French, however much people like Cohen may wish this were the case. This alternate history of the 2004 presidential election has become a comforting salve for many liberal writers, so easy is it to blame the loss of their candidate (and their shared world view) on the idiocy of the American people. Republicans always have bad ideas, this narrative goes, and conservative victories are always due to cleverness and deceit. Only if Republicans can fool enough Americans into believing that Democrats are “egghead liberals short on Iraq testosterone” can they win. That Kerry lost because he was a lousy candidate and had an inconsistent and incomprehensible policy on the Iraq War is not an explanation that writers like Cohen wish to entertain.
As much as Cohen’s misreading of Kerry’s loss is off-base, so is his understanding of the current Democratic nominee, who, whatever his politics, is one of the most dynamic political figures of the age. Indeed, likening Obama’s plight to Kerry’s, Cohen unwittingly insults the man he is attempting to praise. To put it in terms that Cohen might better understand: Comparing Barack Obama to John Kerry is like comparing Nicolas Sarkozy to Jacques Chirac.
Cohen then cites familiar figures about the electorate’s strong preference for Democratic policies over Republican ones. From this, he concludes that “Americans are looking to European health care and environmental measures as possible models.” It’s true that some policy wonks here may admire what some policy wonks in France are proposing about global warming (Cohen’s column is a mass of vague generalities, but I’m assuming that’s the “environmental” issue he’s discussing), but American admiration for French policies pretty much ends there. I don’t think Americans want militant labor unions running the country, the worst race relations in the western world, or 7.5% unemployment (keep in mind that figure is historically low for France, the lowest in 25 years in fact, and is due to the conservative, free market economic policies of Nicolas Sarkozy). But that’s just me, writing from my sheltered, Washington, D.C. cloister. Certainly if I were a New York Times foreign affairs columnist, I’m sure I’d see America — and the world — a whole lot differently.
“One thing the French love about Obama is his talk of dialogue, even with Iran.” Mais, bien sur! One doesn’t have to resort to crude jokes about French appeasement and surrender to find this farcical. Roger Cohen wants Barack Obama to run on a platform that would prove popular in France. It’s a good thing, for Obama at least, that he isn’t on his campaign staff.
